Light House Life Lessons

Of my four grandparents, the only one I recall meeting was my paternal grandmother. She did not have what I would call the grandma touch. I have at least two vivid memories that stand out to me when I think of her. It might be important to note that she was a widow for a few years by the time these memories took place.

When we were teens my uncle and aunt would bring my grandma down to visit with us for the day while they drove to a different town to visit with my aunt’s family for Christmas. Our city was on the way between where they started out and where they needed to end up so it worked out pretty well.

On this particular day, my mother was preparing a turkey dinner with all the fixings. This may well have been more of a meal than we normally would have been able to afford, but because grandma was coming it needed to be special. And to us it was. I distinctly remember my grandma asking my mother what we were having for dinner. My mom told her we were having the turkey dinner with all the fixings that normally went with it. Grandma rudely answered that she couldn’t stand turkey. Well, mom being the person she was and trying to make everyone happy, quickly pulled a foil-wrapped ham out of the freezer. Now mind you, this was well before the microwave was a common household appliance, so the only way to thaw it was to bake it in the oven in the hope that it would thaw enough to cut a few slices and serve them along with everything else as though it had been planned that way all along.

This might not sound so bad to you, but it probably messed up the family food budget for the next while. You see, we were poor. There were six of us in the family and at least three of us four kids were in our early teens by then. We were likely scheduled to make several meals from that turkey and the ham was probably being saved for some week well into the future. We didn’t eat ham dinners very often. So the fact that once meat had thawed it couldn’t be frozen again meant we would be eating a lot of meat in the next few days before it could spoil. Once the meat was cooked, it could be frozen, but it might well end up getting freezer burn and wouldn’t be the same as it should have been, to begin with.

The second memory was after I was married and had my first born who was about eighteen months at the time. My older sister and I had taken my son and my brother’s son who were just 18 days apart in age up to visit my grandmother in the old-age home she lived in. When we walked through the door, she took one look at me and said, “Karen, how did you get so fat?” I’m pretty sure I said, “Gee grandma, I don’t know. I guess I ate one too many desserts and, poof!” The entire time we were there she was nervous about the boys getting into things. Now we had my sister and I to divide and conquer so to speak, so they weren’t going to be causing any trouble. Besides, they were very well behaved.

I also remember that when mom would send her the 5×7 photos we had taken each fall at school for Christmas, that she would send us back the ones from the year before, simply switching them out of the same frames. Now that I am older, I understand this was likely her way of not having to deal with clutter, but it always set wrong with me. As I said, she just didn’t have the grandma touch.

Once I dug a little deeper into her genealogy, I began to understand a little more about why she may have been the way she was. It seems that when her Irish father and English mother got married, her mother’s family disowned their daughter and later left her only $1 in their will so she couldn’t contest it. So she never really got to know her maternal grandparents.

Then, her Irish grandparents listed themselves as widowed in the 1900 census although they were clearly both still alive and even living in the same county, though in different townships. In her grandfather’s will, he mentioned that he did not want his wife to get the customary one-third widow’s right as she had kept all the money the children had earned while growing up. He also didn’t want his oldest daughter to have anything either because she was mean to him. Family stories say he was a drinker and she was not a nice person. This might or might not be the case, but after learning all this it was much easier to forgive my grandmother for not having the touch. How could she? She never had the example of what a kind caring grandmother was supposed to be like. I figure she did the best she could with the hand she was dealt. By the time we came along, she had already been a grandmother to my uncle’s three kids for about ten years or so and maybe they got a different sort of grandmother out of the deal, who knows? My dad was so obviously not her favorite child, but that is a story for another post.

This post is part of the weekly Five Minute Friday link-up!
The prompt this week is: Touch
The assignment: Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation. Just write.