Memories of Granny

I spent the weekend looking at old photos of the family. Grandma was obviously in most of those, and a rush emotion came over me. Many of us grandkids hold a special place in our hearts for grandma. She had a quality that was hard to define but easy to love. She was a simplistic woman in many ways, but her life was punctuated by being extraordinary. I watched her do it, but I couldn't begin to tell you how she pulled it off. She spent much of her life with calf slobber on her overalls, although that never kept her from smelling as fresh as a daisy on Sunday mornings while attending her little sweatbox of a church in Waldron Kansas. She was the only woman who could make a dab of Avon on her wrists last all day long. Most of the time the air conditioner refused to work in the summer in the little run-down church and to top it off there was no indoor plumbing. It's not that it was the year 1870 mind you, it's just that the people in her church were broke most of the time. There were only four to five women in that congregation including her lady preacher Ruby Clum. Ruby, at one time (before she became a Christian woman) could cuss a blue streak and kill a bottle of vodka in one evening by herself. She was also a whiz at playing and winning at poker. Which is to say that every woman in this church had their own story and were characters in their own right. Tough woman never ceases to amaze me because no matter what other chores they find on their plate they are always able to somehow fit it in next to being caretakers. Good women always seem to work from the outside in, instead of the other way around. Unconditional love is not their burden, it's their pleasure.

Grandma lost grandpa when he was at the tender age of 52 to cancer. Did she mourn for him, of course she did. Did she let his passing make her bedridden and unable to function... of course not. Because the woman had responsibilities and a teenage son, she had to finish raising on her own. Many were the times I watched her carry two full (five-gallon) feed buckets in one hand and a semi-wet bale of alfalfa under the opposite arm. Keep in mind those could easily weigh better than a hundred pounds. She regularly worked out her upper body doing farm-girl chores, and she had the shoulders to prove it. Not so long ago my cousin Cathy told me she inherited that family trait. The trait I got was granny's veracious veins; that hardly seems fair. But oh well, we get what we get, right?

I remember distinctly once when my cousin David and I were visiting her for a few weeks out of the summer. She took us to the only drug store in Anthony Kansas and proceeded to spoil us in only the way she could. She told us to round up a hand full of suckers and when I came back around the corner from the soda fountain, I saw one of the old farmers in town putting the moves on her and his arm had fallen from her shoulder quickly on to her right buttock. My first thought was, I wonder how this is going to go. Then I heard her tell him (and I quote), "if you don't want to lose that hand you better MOVE IT!" Trust me, that was a threat she surely could have backed up. All the old homesteaders around that area of Kansas would have loved to marry up with Grandma. The reasons were many, but the number one reason was she was likely the best cook in Harper County. Even when suitors with a legit status hit on her she would say simply, "I have only been in love with one man in my life and the fact that he is in the ground won't change that. I have a particular kind of appreciation for anyone who carries the idea of "until death do we part" one step further.

Grandma also played piano beautifully, and like none other. She wasn't like your traditional concert pianist where hands, feet, and wrists always rested in a particular place at just the right time. Her fingers flowed over the keys like she was rubbing an ointment into a sore muscle. You could see the rhythm of the instrument move through her body as every little note cascaded through her brain and moved with ease to her talented hands. I'm fairly sure makes her a prodigy. It's not so much of a skill as it is a gift. And that gene got passed on down to many people on our immediate family tree. Her oldest son (my uncle Dave) was even able to play a piano and a keyboard at the same time which essentially blows my no-instrument playing mind.

One frigid Kansas morning granny and I went out to bust the ice on the water tank so the calves could get a drink. Cows drink an absorbent amount of water even in the cold. They usually drink somewhere between 15 and 50 gallons of water per day depending on their size and how hot the weather is. I remember us having an extraordinarily hard time busting the ice that morning as it was a few inches thick and my winded ten-year-old self turned around and said to her in an exasperated voice, "Hey granny, when's the good part?" Her answer was simple and direct, she said to me, "this IS the good part." Her lesson was, life isn't always fun and games, sometimes it's taxing. It's interesting how she was always able to impart a life lesson with care, a bit of pepper when it was necessary, and spin the whole yarn together with a bit of humor when you weren't looking. She even schooled me on the subject of death: she would say that death was nothing to fear as long as we understood the salvation that was available to us from Jesus Christ. She told me death was as much a part of life as being born, it's simply the end of the trip. And she was right, none of us are getting out of here alive.

In winter of 1975 we went to live with grandma as mom and dad were in the middle of a messy divorce. Dad felt the need to get on with his life and the last thing mom wanted to do was watch. Granny (being the smart woman she was) knew I was going need a batch of chores to keep me busy and therefore, distracted. Did you know that a cow will never kick over a milk bucket when you are two pulls in? They ALWAYS wait until it is three quarters full. I explained to grandma the finer points of third down in a football game and she taught me how to neuter a calf and turn him into a steer. Neither skill still serves me to this day but hey, knowledge of any kind is never wasted. I feel so blessed to have been able to spend that time with my grandma. You don't ever really get to know someone well until you see how they take their coffee in the morning and watch them set their alarm clock at night.