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The Grandmothers I Didn’t Know
How I wish I could have known my grandmothers. How I wish they could have seen their legacy. Still, I carry them with me.
My grandmother Isabel spent most of her life locked in a psychiatric ward. My Dad last saw her when he was six years old; she died before I was born.
My grandmother Lawson lived in Texas and I grew up in New York. She and my mom had a terrible relationship, and we rarely saw her. Both grandmothers were born in the late 1800s and are long gone. Each was a pioneer but in very different ways.
And though I didn’t know them, they are with me.
Grandmother Lawson was a pioneer in the literal sense. Her parents emigrated from Germany to Texas in the 1800s as part of a group given a large land grant by the Republic of Texas. The town they helped settle, Fredericksburg, named after Prussian Prince Frederick, was in the heart of what’s now known as “The Hill Country.”
As homesteaders, they arrived to dry and wild land, and of course, no running water or electricity. As immigrants, they didn’t speak the language. Illnesses swept through the new community with a relentless vengeance. Waves of cholera, tuberculosis, typhoid, and measles decimated the population. My grandmother was only four years old when she lost her mother to influenza. Her father died when she was seven.
To improve her accent and pronunciation, my grandmother took “elocution” classes. Her teacher, “Miss Rebekah Baines” would go on to marry Sam Johnson, and their son Lyndon would become the 36th president of the United States. My grandmother became a teacher in a one-room school house.
As an adult, my grandmother was referred to as “a character.” She had long, brown hair down and always wore a brown felt hat pulled low and jaunty over her brow. She rode horses, loved Mexican food, collected “junk” (now antiques), and read poetry and books in German. She married my Irish grandfather and a year later gave birth to my Mom on a kitchen table.
My mom was an only child, and they were at loggerheads from the time my mother was a little girl. There’s not a…
