I'm not good at these sorts of things. I have a good random memory but with Bubbe; it's difficult to pick out a moment that stands above the feeling of her.

I don't remember the first time I heard the story of little toddler Yona having to be pried from her mother in the kibbutz showers and go back to the other kids. My feeling of Bubbe is, I can understand why, on a communal farm near the border with Lebanon in 1950s Israel, a person of any age could want to stick close by her.

Because my picture of Bubbe is a figure of looming and luminous calm. I was not above a tantrum or two at the toddler age myself, in that time when I--or Mia and I--would most often stay with Bubbe and Grandfather. WHERE ARE MY PARENTS. I WANT TO GO HOME. I was a brat. But no amount of tantrum could dislodge Bubbe's zen like patience. She would still be there, with soup or cereal or plastic wrapped sandwiches or Bubbe Cookies (tm), maintaining the bandwidth to check if Will had really eaten all he could or would at any given meal.

When I called her on her 90th birthday, and asked how she felt, she said "the same! you think you're going to get older and feel different, but no matter how old I get, I feel like the same person I was when I was a girl. I'm still me."

It's tough to pick out a memory of Bubbe for me because Bubbe has just always seemed to be there, to be her, calm and strong and doing the work of love and the work of family and the work of crafting a feeling of home, that follows you wherever you go, no matter where she is.