The Saturday Morning Post: Grandparents

 I was lucky as a child, I had a full complement of grandparents, both my maternal and paternal grandparents lived into my adulthood, and one of my great grandmothers lived into my young adulthood. She outlived my two grandfathers by a year.  

My paternal grandparents lived on the same farm, at least nine months out of the year.  They started snow-birding, going to Florida for the winters when I was a toddler. My father and his father ran the bee farm together.  He was born in west central Illinois, north of St. Louis and on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. He was one of a dozen kids, by the time he was born his father had spent through a trust fund, and landed on 80 acres of mediocre farmland that he had neither the ambition or knowledge to farm.  As a boy my grandfather spent summers working fields along the Mississippi River with horses and mules for 15-cents a day, his family needed the money.  When Ford advertised $5 a day, they sold the farm and moved to Detroit. Both my grandfather and his father, worked for Ford.  My grandfather as a machine setter, my great-grandfather in the power house at the Ford estate. My father's mother was born near Greenwich, England, and her family moved to the USA when she was a child.  Her father was digging tunnels in Detroit, and lived near where my grandfather's family did.  

They were bright people.  My grandfather had a grade school education, my grandmother was nearly a high school graduate.  Her mother was burned in a kitchen accident during her last year of high school and she never went back to finish.  They were industrious and careful with money.  Two fond memories of my grandfather, curling up with him in his big wing chair and watching Lawrence Welk when I was a little thing, and the day he quit driving.  I was helping my grandmother in the kitchen on a canning project and he went out to put his car in the garage.  He pulled forward and hit the wall on one side, backed up pulled forward and scraped the wall on the other side.  Backed up parked it, came in the kitchen dropped the keys on the counter and said, "if I can't get it in the garage, I shouldn't be driving it." A very wise man. He died a couple of years later.  I spent many hours in that kitchen helping my grandmother or just watching and talking. 

My mother's parents were complicated.  Both had grade school educations.  He was at heart a farmer of the old school, one of about 20 kids, he loved farming with horses or mules.  Her mother died from tuberculosis when she was a child (I only learned the cause a couple of years ago, it was a deep family secret.)  Her father remarried and started a second family and she never got over the loss.  She had a lot of emotional baggage from her childhood.  She married the first man who showed any interest in her so she could get out of the house.  The early years of their marriage were difficult, he worked on farms often for barely enough to live on.  My mother was a C-section at a time when any surgery was considered life and death. She never really recovered from the terror of that surgery.  My mother was an only child.  

Before I started school, he had an accident on the farm and broke a leg. While recovering from the broken leg, he had a heart attack. The doctors advised him to give up farming or plan a funeral.  (This was the early 1960's before bypass surgery and pacemakers.) They sold out, bought a travel trailer and a new pickup truck and started splitting the year between Michigan and Florida, with occasional fishing trips to Canada. On their way back and forth they would sometimes spend a few weeks parked on the farm, they spent a couple of summers parked on the farm.  They were a presence in and out of my life. They could be very welcoming or cold and prickly. Over the years I have learned about their path in life and probably better understand them now than then. 

Ah, the great grandmother.  My father's mother's mother lived with my grandparents for about a decade. For a few years she would winter with one of her sons, she spent one winter living with my aunt, and several winters in Florida with my grandparents.  She was born in Wales, moved to the USA as a young mother.  Had lived across the eastern half of the USA, from New York, to Chicago, and as far south as Memphis. She was nearly blind, and spent her days listening to the radio, and walking back and forth in the sun-room on the farmhouse. I would sit and listen with her and talk. She was an amazing story teller who had lived a fascinating life. 

My grandfathers died weeks apart when I was in high school, my great grandmother a year later.  My grandmothers lived on, one dying while I was in my early 30's, the other one the year after we moved to Kentucky. 

All five of them played a role in me, being who I am today.  I was so lucky to have them around.