Lessons from Grammie
Reflections from my own messy middle
In 1920 — the same year women got the vote — my great-grandmother, Louise, departed New England for the first time.
By the time I knew her, Louise had stepped into her role as Grammie, an elderly widow whose days were spent tending to her Sacramento home and family with a simple, steady devotion.
The Trailblazing New Englander
When she was just twenty-two-years-old, Louise and her husband, Burt, set out for California, a place where they would start their own family and build a life together.
The warm climate and the prospect of good jobs pulled them out West. To leave everything and everyone they knew was bold enough, but Louise and Burt made the almost three-month voyage by way of a motorcycle and sidecar, with little more than those clothes on their backs.
Growing up, I heard only bits and pieces of the story of young Louise’s bitterly cold New England beginnings and her move to sunny California, where she lived nearly seventy of her ninety-two years. Later, with the help of my aunt, who serves as our de facto family historian, I learned the nitty gritty, glorious details of Louise’s epic journey.
With the modest savings they’d accumulated, a working bike and sidecar, a handmade tent, two blankets, two rain jackets, a small bag containing a few personal items, and a single change of clothes, Louise and Bert set out from Revere, Massachusetts on June 1, 1920.
The treasure trove of her photos, mementos, and writings resurrects Louise’s journey:
Crossing the USA by motorcycle was a fascinating lesson in geography; awesome Niagara Falls, the fine gravel roads of Indiana, Missouri mud, many friendly farm families, level land and wheat in Kansas, scenic Colorado where my husband caught his first golden trout, the vast open areas of Utah, Nevada and southern California with sagebrush, roadrunners, and wild burros . . . There were hot days and nights, flat tires, mosquitoes, lightning, thunder, wind and rain, more mud, gritty sand, and at last, California, with palm trees and green grass.
For the duration of their time on the road, Louise dressed in a pair of work coveralls, her sole accessory the goggles she wore when they rode, to protect her eyes from the dust and pebbles that swirled around the Harley on the unpaved roads.
The couple mostly slept outside, under the stars, reserving the tent for when the weather required it.
With few public campgrounds available back then, Louise and Burt drove off-road, kick at any bushes to root out snakes, lay out their blankets, and roll their shoes up into their sweaters as a pillow upon which to rest their heads for the night.
On August 28, 1920, Louise and Burt arrived in the salty air of the Southern California Coast, in beautiful Ventura Beach. The trip out West wasn’t just a way to get to their destination, it was a goal unto itself. The Motorcycle and Trade Association was awarding people who rode 1,000, 2,000, or 3,000 miles or more, with corresponding bronze, silver, or gold medals for the achievement.
At the end of their journey, the speedometer showed that they had covered more than 7,000 miles, more than doubling what they needed.
Picking Up & Putting Roots Back Down in Northern California
After forty years in Southern California, her husband Burt died in 1960. Grammie packed up her belongings, dug up her beloved fig tree, and moved north to Sacramento to be close to my grandpa Wally and his family.
As the eldest of the Great Grandchildren, I got the biggest dose of her love and attention, thirteen years in all.
Grammie was strawberries and sunshine and, for me, stability.
As a little girl, I spent endless afternoons in her care while my mom, a young divorcee, worked a hodge-podge of working-class jobs.
At Grammie’s house, there was never worry about when or whether mealtime would arrive.
Greeting me at each visit were the butterscotch candies she kept stocked in an easy-to-reach copper dish near the front door that felt like it existed just for me.
Grammie’s backyard was home to a giant orange tree that shaded most of the yard, along with the sprawling fig tree she uprooted and brought up to Sacramento from her former Southern California home. Its rope swings supplied countless hours of figgy fun.
Even now, when I pine for comfort food, it's Grammie’s standard lunch fare that’s conjured into memory. Thick-sliced cheddar cheese and butter sandwiches on dark rye, a scoop of cottage cheese, and a bowl of what were surely the best-sliced oranges, straight from Grammie’s tree.
When I learned years later, long after Grammie passed away, that she had secretly sprinkled sugar on the orange slices for me because, in my mom’s words, “the oranges her tree produced were awful! She had to sugar them,” it did nothing to diminish the sweetness of the memories I keep close from the years I had with my Grammie. To me, it was perfect.
When school let out in the summer, my post was Grammie’s backyard.
I spent countless hours drawing and writing my stories with the crayons and paper Grammie kept for me. Spreading my materials out on the patio, I laid tummy down, a lizard sunning herself.
Back at Mom’s those nights, I’d curl up in bed, finding peace enough to fall asleep from the warm waxy crayon smell on my hands.
The fondness of these memories is no doubt due as much for what wasn’t at Grammie’s as what was.
Grammie’s home was a magical place, where dark moods and drinking, where raised voices and the raised hands that sometimes followed, found no purchase.
I don’t know why Grammie’s house was immune from those things. They certainly reared up at other family members’ homes — making for plenty of tense gatherings over the years. To be sure, any equation that involved my mom and her father in the same room was ripe for a blow-up, with their twin alcoholism fanning their too-short tempers.
Somehow though, everyone was at their best at Grammie’s.
The Woman in Between
Between her journey from New England to Southern California and Grammie’s move up North to Sacramento, she and Burt spent four decades living in Southern California, working and raising my grandpa Wally, who was born in July of 1921.
Their early years were a series of peaks and valleys. Initial good fortune brought employment for Burt with the Los Angeles Times as a photo engraver and home ownership for the young family.
But with the Stock Market crash of 1929, Burt lost his job, and the family lost their home. During the Great Depression, Burt worked intermittent jobs wherever he could find them, doing everything from ditch digging to gold mining.
Louise’s high marks on a shorthand test helped land her a long-term position with the State Emergency Relief Administration. Wally held two weekend jobs in addition to attending school.
In 1941, Wally was close to home, attending the local junior college when the attack on Pearl Harbor changed everything.
The family of three rallied, each in their own way, in the war efforts.
Burt worked with planes in Burbank. Wally enlisted in the Navy, serving as a hospital corpsman overseas until his discharge in 1946. Louise worked the night shift with the Army Corps of Engineers, rising through the ranks, eventually supervising a staff of forty other women.
After the War, Burt stopped working altogether, his arthritis reducing him to an invalid. Louise continued to work to put food on the table and worked a second shift as Burt’s caretaker until his death fifteen years later.
Beyond these details, what Louise’s life was like between her stint as a young pioneer and her rise to matriarch in Sacramento is harder to distill.
Was she happy?
Did she stay in Southern California, apart from her grown son and her grandkids in Sacramento, apart from her remaining living relatives in New England, because it’s what she wanted?
Her prompt move to Sacramento following Burt’s death suggests not.
That woman-in-the-middle feels complicated by compromise and stoicism, in a way that makes it hard to know or understand what she thought, what she felt.
As I sit here, squarely in my own messy middle, I think I understand why.
The lift-off of our beginnings, swollen with possibility, carries a certain excited anticipation, doesn’t it? And the tenderness of our final landings holds some peace, because hindsight critiques aside, what’s done is done.
But the middle can be murky. Shapeless. Hard to interpret.
It seems like only in retrospect, does the full picture emerge. In the messy middle, there are weeks — years even — when we toil away towards this or that goal, only to find the goalpost has been moved further away.
The messy middle is marked by “have to’s.” Raising families, striving for financial stability, and weathering the storms of our own wars and depressions.
I think my Grammie felt that ache and frustration in her own messy middle. There are hints of it peppering our family folklore, as in the case of her rejection of the proposal from her church minister, who courted her in the 1960s. “I’m not taking care of another sick, old man,” she told her son and daughter-in-law.
She had been raised in a generation of women who kept stiff upper lips amidst difficult circumstances, who delayed or denied their own dreams for the good of family, community, or country, and who, no matter what, stood by their men.
But every woman has her limits.
Societal constraints aside, Grammie was a born optimist. She found the best in all things and people. She always spoke fondly of her girlhood in Massachusetts.
She would regale us with tales of a happy early life with her parents and her four brothers and sisters. In one story, Grammie talked about how “fun” it was when she and her four siblings would huddle around the family’s wood-burning stove to dress on cold mornings.
In contrast, when Grammie’s sister visited her and our California family in the 1960s, the sister’s version of the same story was one of bitter lament about how awful growing up poor with little heat was. To those who knew Grammie, this discrepancy was no surprise. She was a glass-half-full gal, through and through.
I know she had hard times, even hard years. But there was nary a complaint.
Despite being separated from her family of origin for most of her life.
Despite losing the home she and her husband worked so hard for during the Great Depression and having to start over, while raising a son.
Despite becoming the sole breadwinner and caregiver to an ailing husband in her 40s.
Despite stomach ulcers, crippling arthritis, and a bout with breast cancer.
Despite family dysfunction marked by addiction and fractured relationships.
She probably didn’t even hold a grudge against my Grandpa Wally, after he inadvertently punched her, instead of his intended target (a guest), at my parents’ 1974 wedding in a buzzed-if-not-drunken state.
He hit her hard enough to cause her to fall and strike her head on a fireplace, lacerating her skull. Her slight frame of five-foot-one and 100 pounds probably made the reception guests gasp when she went down, but little did they know how scrappy my Grammie was. It would have taken far more than a single punch to knock her spirit down.
On my best days, it takes more than that to knock me down, too.
Every day, when I wake up, I turn to the wall near my bed and see a framed picture of Grammie, with four-year-old me on her lap.
I set my daily intention to harness her ability to persevere during the hard times, her spirit of optimism, her devotion to family, and her ability to forgive people their imperfections.
On my best days, I do.
Lindsay Bennett is a human rights lawyer and freelance writer. As a lawyer, Lindsay focuses on a range of social justice issues. As a writer, Lindsay focuses mostly on personal essays and opinion pieces, like this piece in Ms. She and her two sons live in Northern California with their beloved Australian shepherd and a bunny named Pedro.
