Even Grandmas Get in Trouble
Emeraude, berry pies, bags of pennies, and a party skill.
Of all the relatives I spent time with growing up, I got to know Gramma Gladys the best. Gramma (Gladys Lillian Helen Cousins Hines) was my father's mother. She smelled of Emeraude perfume, had wavy blue hair (like lots of old ladies in the mid-20th century), and red polish on the nails of her gnarled, arthritic fingers.
Over Two Rivers and Through Some Woods
Some summers, not every summer, I would get to stay at her house in Gibsonia (north of Pittsburgh, PA) for a couple weeks. Just Gramma and me. In her tiny, dilapidated shack of a home, never intended to be more than a summer camp house, but pressed into full-time service when she and Grandpa Hines divorced.
She had no running water, no toilet—in the 1960s. She used an outhouse. But she mostly let me use a chamber pot.
She went for fresh water every so often, at a nearby "well" that looked to me like nothing more than a bare metal pipe coming out of a hillside. She'd load up her tiny, tin-can-y Renault with all the empty gallon milk jugs it would hold. Then, at the well, she'd patiently fill them up, one by one.
She never got to take a real bath unless she was visiting us or Aunt Juanita. With no running water and no bath tub or shower, sponge baths at the kitchen sink were the best she could manage.
So in the middle of my two-week visits, she would let me climb up on her kitchen counter, put my feet in the sink, and get a sponge bath. My fine blonde hair would get washed in the sink as well, with water warmed in a blue-speckled coffee pot on the stove.
The saving grace was the sink drain that fed out into the yard somewhere. At least she didn't have to toss a sink-full of water out into the grass.
Just Being Neighborly
Gramma's land included a small patch of woods on the other side of an even smaller patch of grass. Two paths took off from the sloping yard into the dark, mysterious, and otherwise impenetrable mass of green wildness.
The left path, further downhill from the road, began at the out house, twisted and turned a bit, and ended up in the Carney's back yard. The three Carney kids were close to my age, so we'd play together sometimes.
The right path began close to the narrow road above, paralleling it and running almost all the way to the main road. This was the berry-picking path. This delightful path was loaded down with smallish, seedy-but-sweet black raspberries for one magical week, or maybe two, each year.
At my age, I didn't know anything about harvest time. I was a city dweller. I wondered why sometimes there were berries and sometimes not, and never really put it together. I just counted myself lucky if I happened to be at Gramma's house when there were berries to be gathered.
Most of the berries went into Gramma's tart jam, with seeds that stuck in your teeth. Gramma wasn't about to squander her meager social security income on fancy store-bought mason jars with lids you had to replace every time. She just put her jam into recycled Smucker's jars, topped off with a little bit of melted wax to keep the jam from going bad.
The rest of the berries went into pies. One to eat herself (or maybe two, if family was coming for dinner), one for the Carneys, and one for the lady across the road. It was only neighborly, after all.
Who Needs TV When You Have a Grandma?
Those two special weeks with just me and Gramma were the highlight of my summers. I didn't miss TV because there was plenty to do at Gramma's house. And she was happy to have a diversion like me to spend her time with.
There were special toys at Gramma's: my cousin Ralph's hand-me-down plastic building blocks and Lincoln logs, lots of jigsaw puzzles, and containers full of interesting fabric and trim scraps I could raid for making Barbie clothes. Gramma knew she could count on me to stay in her bedroom and play quietly while she cooked or tidied up.
Then it was time for other pursuits. Sometimes I would watch Gramma embroider pillow cases or crochet fancy edgings on hankies. I would watch, mesmerized, as the beauty unfolded beneath her ancient but skilled hands.
Somehow, she never got around to teaching me those feminine arts. (Although I eventually learned embroidery in Girl Scouts.)
No, all Gramma taught me was how to play cards. And shuffle.
In Trouble Over Pennies
It started out innocently enough. Go Fish. But then, at the tender age of six, she taught me to play Poker. For pennies. Oh, that was fun!
Looking back, I'm guessing she was letting me win, but she acted like I was brilliant and told me I had beginner's luck. I liked the sound of that.
At the end of the visit, when Dad picked me up, those pennies came with. I innocently carried my brown paper bag of treasure into the house, gathered at the neck, sagging from the weight.
"Where did you get all these pennies?" Mom wanted to know.
"I won them from Gramma playing poker," I proudly replied.
"What? She taught you to gamble??? We'll see about that!"
Oops. Gramma was in BIG trouble.
After Mom let Gramma know that gambling was NOT an acceptable thing for her daughter to be learning, that was the end of my career as a card sharp.
I Still Use This Life Skill
The next year, Gramma taught me Canasta. This game was acceptable to Mom and a social coup for Gramma. Once I got good at Canasta, she started taking me along to afternoon card parties at her friends' houses. Five women over 60 and tiny little me. They thought I was so cute.
And then they saw me play. Now they were impressed. And they were even more impressed when my hands had grown just enough to let me shuffle a fat double deck of cards.
Under Gramma's expert tutelage, I had spent hours over several summers practicing my shuffling. And now, hearing the exclamations of her friends as they watched me shuffle that double deck, Gramma just beamed.
Is This My Future?
Once, in her later years, as dementia crept up on her, my boyfriend accused her of cheating at Canasta. I'm guessing it was just her brain going haywire.
After all, she had fled the scene of a minor fender-bender around that time, saying "That man acted like he wanted me to stop! Can you believe it?" After that, her kids took the car away.
Not long after, she moved in with Aunt Juanita. One day, in a brain fog, she walked out the front door, purse on her arm, and boarded a bus for downtown Pittsburgh. Fortunately, the police rescued her as she exited the bus on Sixth Avenue.
Her long, slow descent into darkness was a foreshadowing. Both Dad and Aunt Juanita suffered the same fate. Everyone in my generation is wondering which of us will succumb.
As for Gramma, it was hard to see my kind, neighborly, gentle Gramma lose her marbles. So I try to remember the good years and all the loving things she did for me.
In terms of Godly living, she fulfilled the admonition of bloom where you are planted. Or, as Paul says it, "In whatever condition you were called, brothers and sisters, there remain with God" (1 Cor 7:24 NRSVUE).
She had little in the world's terms, but she gave me everything she had in the terms that really matter: love, time, example, and a still-impressive ability to shuffle cards.
What I Learned from Gladys
Do the best you can with what you’ve got.
Attitude and hospitality is more important than the specifics of what you are able to offer.
Children are always watching. Set a good example.
Make friends with your neighbors. Pies (or other food) can be a good way to break the ice and maintain the relationship.
Be grateful for indoor plumbing and hot running water. Not everyone has such.
Check with the parents before teaching a child to gamble.
Many skills require a lot of practice to become proficient. But if you return to them periodically, they’ll stick with you for life. (And, you might have fun impressing people at parties. 😜)
What’s Your Takeaway?
Who has been in your life that faced unfortunate circumstances, but yet exemplified the lesson of blooming where you are planted? Please share in the comments.
Hope you are enjoying this series: “The Wisdom in Our Breadcrumbs—A Trail Lit Mostly with Love.”
Know someone who needs to hear this message? Please share or restack.
Thanks for subscribing to Spiritual Life Storyteller! Subscribe for free to get weekly updates and links to the latest stories, and to be eligible to participate in subscriber-only chat threads.
Getting too much email? Click here to update your preferences. If you select only Fractal Fridays, you’ll get a once-a-week email that will include excerpts of anything else I’ve written.
Loved your story. Ahh, the joy of child innocence.
Sharon:
How interesting! I never knew my paternal grandmother. She died when my dad was young. Grandpa and Dad's sister, Isabelle raised him in Turtle Creek and Cleveland. The person I knew as my paternal grandmother's name was Anna, Zimmerman Sherwin. She was a tall, stately German lady that grew up in a shack up around Renovo PA. she told us of how their log cabin wasn't chinked, so the winter winds came right through the walls. Her father died when the horses pulling his wagon stopped on a railroad track. He was killed instantly. Somehow, she fond her way to a secretarial school and ended up working for Westinghouse. That's where Grandpa met her. I do not remember her ever loosing her temper. She would get upset with Grandpa, which would result in her saying, "Oh Harry, you know..." She and Grandpa lived in Springdale, up the hill from the infamous power plant. They visited our house almost every Saturday unless we went to their house. Three things stand out about her. One, If she baked a pie and it wasn't all eaten within the day it was baked, she felt the pie was terrible. and Two, If she played any sort of card game, she insisted that all the blinds be closed so the neighbors wouldn't see her gambling. She didn't want to set a non Christian example. Third, she went berry picking with us in the along the valley that we grew up in. She died in the car, in the church parking lot, in the time it took for Grandpa to close her door and walk around the car. We were all devastated.
Grandma Boyd, was an exemplary saint. Grandpa Boyd died while my mother was a teenager. He had the first mechanized shoemaker's shop, west of the Alleghenys. The dust disabled him and he was an invalid for many years. She took everything in stride. Feeding the Hobos that would come up from the Pennsylvania Railroad that was over the hill from their home. She continued to do this even though her friends and neighbors were shocked by that. She always held that it was better for her to feed 100 non-deserving than to miss the opportunity to feed one angel. I could write a book about each of them.
Grandpa and Grandma Sherwin and Grandma Boyd were loudly silent in the family. Always helping always encouraging, always giving way beyond what we knew. They blessed us all imeasurably.