My grandmother came to America when she was just a baby, held in the arms of her mother. She would have been born here, but something happened on the first trip and great-grandma was sent back and had to try again later.
When great-grandmother landed on Ellis Island, the immigration officer changed grandma’s name from Emalia to Molly. Great-grandma and great-grandpa traveled from New York, all the way to Wyoming. My family is part of the German’s from Russia. That’s not the story I’m telling right now although, it is a great story and you can even buy a VHS that tells you all about it. Not here, somewhere else. Put that credit card away.
Thankfully, there was no, No Child Left Behind, program when grandma was a child and she had to learn English and be able to communicate with the people around her before she could attend school. After all, she was in America, not Germany.
Grandma out lived two husbands. The first one was my biological grandpa and I never knew him. He was a welder and had a shop across the street from their house. One day grandma went to the shop and found him, dead of a heart attack.
My mom is the second youngest of the nine children grandma and grandpa had together. My father was in the Navy until I was ten and in the summers when Dad would be on tour, we girls; me, Mom and my sister, would get on a plane and fly out to Grandma’s house with our little Yorky and spend several weeks in Cheyenne with her/our family.
Later, when Dad retired from the Navy, I was 10 years old. We moved further east from California to about a three hour drive from Grandma’s house. Grandma eventually re-married to a nice man named Harold. She adopted his religion which required her to grow her hair long and wear dresses, hers were always calico in the summer. Harold lived on a cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere. It says so on the map, kidding.
I spent many a mind numbingly boring summers out there looking for things to do. It wasn’t all bad though. Being out there helped develop my imagination. Boy howdy did it ever! Grandma also had the complete collection of the Little House on the Prairie books which I read and loved. I also read Nicki Cruse’s; Run, Baby, Run- book about how he came to know the Lord after being in a gang. She taught my sister how to crochet. There were barn cats to play with and adopt. Hay stacks and barn lofts to explore.
Grandma died a couple of years ago. I miss her and her quirky sense of humor which runs deep in our family. I didn’t see the movie; A River Runs Through it, until after my grandmother had died. In one of the scenes the town’s people are having a picnic. There’s one scene of that picnic in particular that made me think of my grandmother and weep. Of course the picnic abounds with homemade edibles from the ladies of the community. One of the ladies hands her husband a piece of homemade bread laden with homemade butter and homemade preserves. Just like we would have at grandma’s house. Waaaaaaaaa!
Thing’s you could find at Grandma’s house: Homemade butter pressed into a plastic storage dish, fresh milk in a metal pitcher with something covering it that looked like a shower cap, beef-sometimes with the name Daisy written across the packages in her stand alone freezer we were never allowed to touch for fear we’d fall into it, (to this day I get a bad case of the sweats whenever I’m around stand alone freezers), books, hand crocheted doilies and afghans, hand embroidered pillow cases and dish towels, plants, an old coffee can full of scraps for the chickens, fresh eggs, gifts from missionaries she and Harold supported financially, framed scriptures hanging on the walls, those pictures of the old man and old woman bowing their heads in prayer over their meager meal.
Being at grandma’s was like stepping back a bit in time. Calico and aprons. Hot, freshly baked bread cooling on handmade tea towels. I miss it all, and I miss grandma the most.
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