My paternal grandmother, Jennie Berkstresser Robertson Smith, ‘Grandma’ to us, lived in the house next door to us when I was growing up. It was the house where my father grew up with the fig tree and the tangerine trees that his father had planted. Born in 1887, Grandma came to California from Oklahoma via Colorado in 1920. Dad used to say part of her trip was by covered wagon. I know she didn’t fly on Southwest.
She gave birth to nine children. My grandfather, father of all those children, died as the result of an auto accident when the ninth child was still an infant. It being the onset of the great depression, Grandma sent three of her nine babies to relatives to raise, and her oldest came home from college to help support the family. She had six sons in a row, and then three daughters. All six of the boys joined the armed services during World War II. I often thought of grandma at home during the war years, worrying about the safety of six sons at once. Hers is a life story that wasn't uncommon for its time but it always impressed me as heroic.
In the 1960s when her rambling old house was too big for her to take care of she moved to a singlewide mobile home in our backyard. I liked the arrangement. It was very convenient for me to drop in on her where she was sitting on her sofa knitting and watching TV. Because grandma was losing her hearing I never had to ask her to turn the volume up, we got Password and the Price Is Right at maximum decibels. I liked sitting with her. Every now and then I would shout something to her, but mostly we just sat and watched TV together. Grandma was a member of the Rebekah Lodge, an organization affiliated with the Odd Fellows Lodge. I never knew much about them except when Grandma went to a meeting she wore a beautiful formal gown and smelled very nice.
As Grandma got older, her sight and her hearing grew dimmer. She spent her last years in a nursing home with very little that she could see or hear. As I become more dependent myself, I think of her often. I wonder what she was thinking as she stared at the wall, as others bathed her and dressed her. I hope she reran these stories of her life in her head that now, at long last, I get to put on paper.
Well, the picture alone is so wonderful and brings us beautifully into time and place. Then, there is the story itself and the self-reflection it inspires. (how i'd love to have tea - or gin - and share stories.) Oh-and: you look exactly the same in both photos. YES-you-do! useless to argue. ~Rose'75
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