Grandma Jackson, RIP

A truly great lady has passed away: Mrs Jessie Jackson of Savu Savu.

Such a genuinely lovely person and one of my favourite people on the planet.

The Jacksons write:

"She had not been well for quite some time so we were expecting her pass any time. She was extremely well looked after by Vola and Simone (her housegirl and her son) and Ian and Loretta went over to see her about a week ago. We last spoke to her on Sat. and she was so so tired and very ready to go.

Would you please pass this onto anyone else who may need to know.

Thank you so so much

love Carolyn and Rayney and all the family xxx"

Grandma Jackson! RIP! Memories! Such fabulous memories.

I first met Jessie Jackson as a young child, when mum sent me to her house in the Domain, "Delani Koro", to give her a message. I knocked on the door and heard a weird-sounding shout "Come in!" ... and went in to find her ... standing on her head. She told me it was her way of dealing with stress and she was feeling very stressed indeed and so she stayed on her head the whole visit. I decided then and there she was a very interesting lady and that I liked her enormously. And then she gave me a tub of broken chocolate bits and that clinched it.

I have so many strange and wonderful stories about her over the years ... stories that show her calm and her generosity and her wisdom, and I may tell you some of them over the next few weeks, but I'll just give you one for now; this is one she told me and I think about it often because it's such an important illustration of how to deal with life:

Seven generations of Mrs Jackson of Nagaga, Savu Savu, had a curse that made their lives a living hell. On their copra plantation, on the swathe of carefully manicured grass up to the house, was a giant cluster of rocks; pinacles of volcanic rock that rose out of the ground; "The Devil's Rocks" they called them because nothing would remove them.

Seven generations of Mrs Jackson dreamed of having an unsullied swathe of manicured grass on the hill up to their house, so for over 150 years, each in turn had the rocks smashed up and hauled away ... or dynamited and hauled away ... but they just grew back. We know now that it was a lava-plug of a volcanic vent but they didn't know that and so it freaked them out and convinced them they were cursed and all this made their lives a living hell.

But the eighth Mrs Jackson of Nagaga, Savu Savu, Jessie, took one look at those rocks and said "Gosh, that's pretty. The lawn would be so boring if they weren't there." and so planted out the cluster of rocks with orchids.

And it was indeed beautiful and the lawn would indeed have been boring without that rock-and-orchid feature.

So that's the story. I love it. I love the idea of generations of imported British wives fighting against the entire geo-thermal forces of Mother Nature and taking it personally that they couldn't win. And I love that Jessie Jackson, as a young bride from New Zealand, just decided to see it differently.

And that's the wisdom of Grandma Jackson I took away from this story: what others may see as a curse if you use your imagination and put your own spin on it, you can easily turn it into a blessing.

Mrs Jessie Jackson of Nagaga, Savu Savu, lolomas and RIP.