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What I have of my grandmother is but a few remnants --- an incomplete set of English china, one hand-tatted lace doily and a child's picky memory that recorded only some of the scattered moments we spent together.

She was our occasional stranger, a foreigner arriving at Kansas City's Union Station, so many miles from Saskatchewan, so many more miles from her native Belfast.

A thin and slightly hunched woman, her face worn by time and troubles, she bore a before-and-after resemblance to my mother. Once, on a rare visit to Canada, my mom and I woke her in her assisted-living apartment. She stared, befuddled, at my mother, whom she did not recognize.

But then she looked at me and saw the daughter she had raised and exclaimed her delight --- "Oh, it's Peggy!" --- at seeing her young one again and at last.

It puzzled me then. It doesn't now.

I see my mother every time I look in the mirror. I feel my grandmother threading her steely will through my mother's heart and into my soul.

Long ago, newly widowed and self-conscious of how her family and neighbors regarded her future, she packed up and left. She boarded a big ship and, all alone, sailed away from everything she knew and toward all she did not - to Canada, where she had one and only one friend.

Thanks to that friend's locale, she settled in Regina, although my mother figures she probably wanted to keep heading west, to be near an ocean, which she loved.

Instead, she placed herself on the flat prairie and conjured the second half of her life. Her new husband, a Scottish widower with a young boy and, soon, my mother became her new anchors, through the Depression, through war, through her second husband's long illness and eventual death.

She scrimped in the ways that only people who have had to scrounge know. She would scrub other people's floors so she could tuck $10 bills into cards she sent to grandkids who barely knew her.

Once, sitting in a Woolworth's diner, my tennis shoes kicking the upholstered bench, I saw her frown at the notion of leaving behind some uneaten toast. Despite her disappointment and our uncomfortable guilt, neither I nor my brother could muster the necessary appetite. It was, to us, just toast.

To me, she was a frugal old woman, made more odd by the gaps of age and geography. Long after her death, as my own years passed, I came to see her as something more.

She was brave and inventive, a survivor of crushing griefs, meager larders and an ocean journey that forced her to recreate her life. Though lacking a college diploma, her intellect soared, and she raised the smartest woman I know.

Once upon a time, she took a deep breath and made a great change. Last year, my mother took her own deep breath and, after years of widowhood, betrothed herself to a wonderful man. They are the cutest couple in town.

Now it's my turn.

After 18 years of driving into an employee parking lot with a hilariously inconsistent security gate, 18 years of writing about politicians, Don Quixotes and garden pests, 18 years of conversing with you, dearest readers, I am changing course.

In August, I board my own mythic ship --- a job with Lt. Gov. Diane Denish, where I will get to explore how all those politics and Don Quixotes (and maybe a few garden pests) really work. After months of debating the wisdom of staying or going from a newspaper that has been my home and my heart, this course was clear.

For years, I have imagined my grandmother on the bow of a ship, her young face turned to the wind, toward all that was to come and away from all that had been. For the first time, I see myself next to her, reaching for her hand, steering myself toward the life I am making and what that life will make of me.