MEMOIRIST IDOL
How Did She Do It All?
Valuable survival lessons from my Grandmother.
This photo of my Grandmother Stella was taken in 1952 or so. I am the toddler on the left and between us is one of my younger cousins. We are sitting on the materials being used by family members to build their farmhouse. I never felt very close to my grandmother as I grew up, and she was rather a mystery to me. The more I learn about her life, the greater my respect for her grows.
Especially now, when I am feeling battered by all the difficult public events since 2016, when Trump and his party ushered in an era of open hate and increasing violence, and installed an extreme right Supreme Court working to strip our personal rights and liberties, and amidst all this, a deadly pandemic that just won’t end.
That’s only the public side of things. On the private side, I’ve had my fair share of the usual personal troubles. Health and money challenges, worries about the well-being of family and friends I love.
But my Grandmother knew more than her fair share of troubles in her long life.
She lived through two World Wars and the Great Depression. She buried two husbands, two of her babies, two adult children, and three grandchildren. She lived in dire poverty and then a hardscrabble life as the working poor. The extended family pulled together and most of what they had they built, grew, and made themselves.
Like the housing that Stella and Herman worked to provide for their family. After Stella’s firstborn bought them the Forty Acres farm, they first built the small log cabin pictured on the right below, and next they built the two-story farmhouse that you see pictured on the left. Later a fully enclosed front porch was added to complete the living space of the larger house.
I find myself contemplating how she survived all the great challenges of her era. I gathered the outline of her life events and I ask myself what lessons I can draw from the stories of her life. I can’t know her thoughts or feelings, but her life can suggest possibilities for how she endured. Possible strategies that can be used to see us through these hard times.
This is the story of Stella.
She was born a few days before Christmas of 1906, Stella Mae Varner, in a very small Missouri town. She fell in love at quite a young age. She was 11 years old when she first clapped eyes on that man working in a farm field. My Grandfather Grover Cleveland Willis. He went by the name Cleve and he would become her first husband.
He was 22 years older than my grandmother. Their families knew each other, and sometimes the Willis family shared living space with the Varners. So it seems Stella had ample opportunity as she grew up to know Cleve, whom she called “her love from the moment she first saw him.”
Stella left school at age 16 with an eighth-grade education and went to work in the local shoe factory. She married Cleve shortly after, in 1923, becoming Stella Mae Willis. Roughly a year or so later their first child was born, Lawrence, followed not long after by my mother Elizabeth and my uncle Grover.
Cleve and Stella operated a dairy farm for two years before selling and moving to Kansas City where he worked in a packing house. Before they could get on their feet, tragedy struck. Stella and Cleve would be beaten down by fate.
Tragedy struck.
Cleve Willis contracted tuberculosis in Kansas City. In a year or so, they moved back to their home area in Missouri, to be near family probably. But then they migrated to Colorado because it was thought the mountain air was good for someone with tuberculosis.
Sadly, it did not help my grandfather or their daughter, Anna Marie Willis, who was born in Durango, Colorado. Born with hereditary TB.
They moved back to Missouri. A county social worker eventually intervened, declaring the family destitute, and the County Court ordered Cleve to a TB hospital in another Missouri city, where he died in December of 1930. Stella was about 24 years old when he died.
Six months after Grandma buried her husband, Cleve, Anna Marie died of TB at age one and a half. The family story told me by my mother is that she was buried in June of 1931, in the same cemetery plot as her daddy and other Willis family, her little body wrapped in a blanket and placed in a woven basket.
As a destitute widow at the onset of the Great Depression, Stella had to leave her three surviving children with her own parents so that she could find work. The entire clan was, as they say, dirt poor. Too many farm folks in 1930 shared in that misery.
Stella’s parents, young siblings, and her own three children lived in a small log cabin with a dirt floor, on land that did not belong to them. Stella’s parents did day labor for the kind farmer who let them live on his land.
Riding the rails.
I have heard tales of my Grandma riding the rails, hopping freight train cars to travel back and forth between the places where she could find work and home, to see her children whenever she could. I have been told she worked in a shoe factory and also as a cook in a hotel.
Eventually, she met her second husband, Herman Thiem. They married in April of 1934 and she was Stella Mae Thiem for the rest of her life. These were hard times and the family moved around a lot. In time, six children were born. But of those six, Herman’s only son, second born child to him, died just two weeks after birth. Still, they persevered until they had a chance for a permanent home.
A chance for a permanent home.
They continued to scrape by, supporting their family as best they could, through the Great Depression and World War II. After the war, Stella’s eldest, my uncle Lawrence, used his war pay to buy his mother and step-dad a forty-acre farm. This was where they would build their two-story farmhouse and live the rest of their married life. It took much hard work before they achieved their desired family home.
When they moved onto the newly purchased farmland, they had no shelter built yet. My grandmother was pregnant with her last born child, and yet she and Herman had to camp out with their children while the smaller log cabin was built. Stella’s last child, a son for Herman, was born in the new log house. Eventually, two more rooms were added to what came to be called “The Old House” when they were able to build the much larger, two-story farmhouse.
This photo is of Stella and Herman Thiem, fairly sober-faced, not smiling much, which is how I mostly remember them.
They made a good life on that farm, blending their subsistence farming with work that Herman found in the town’s shoe factory. Other family members found work in that factory too. Just as when the family pulled together to build a permanent home on their farmland, everyone pitching in who was able.
As my childhood progressed I began to gather my own memories of my Grandmother Stella. It is a hodgepodge of poorly connected memories, as many childhood remembrances are. Spiced with some family stories.
I remember eating fresh strawberries swimming in thick cream, skimmed still warm from someone milking their cow. I also remember bending to pick those strawberries for what felt like hours, and until it felt like my back was breaking!
Determined to finish
I remember inside their kitchen was a door that opened into the darkness of a dirt-floored root cellar, with a ladder to descend to fetch jars of vegetables or jams and jellies Grandma had put up. Root vegetables were stored there also. One of my aunts remembers seeing Grandma canning beets well into the night, crying because she was so tired, but determined to finish the canning.
I recall sitting on the wide front porch that was added to the front of the house, shelling peas into a wide white enameled wash bowl. I also shucked dried corn on that porch to be used to feed the chickens and farm animals they kept.
One memory is about how Grandpa Herman, my dad, and any uncles who were there would go out hunting together for rabbits and squirrels. I helped my dad skin one of the rabbits. Once. And I remember Grandma frying up squirrels to feed us all when store-bought groceries were scarce. It did not taste like chicken.
I remember one day being told to come along with Grandma, me carrying a bag and she carrying a big garden fork. We crossed the road to a field where she started turning up earth and I was astounded to see she was finding potatoes! I was such a city-slicker little girl (and constantly teased about it by my young aunts and uncle on the farm). I thought potatoes came in plastic bags from the grocery. It was a revelation.
She worked so long and hard
I have been told that Stella baked all her own bread when the kids were young. She sewed all their dresses from printed cotton flour sacks. She cut up old wool clothing to make quilted comforters to warm their beds. She worked so long and hard in her vegetable gardens that all her dresses were sun-bleached across the shoulders and back.
There is even one story that she wielded a sledgehammer, breaking up rock fallen from a dilapidated, old house on the property, and using a wheelbarrow to move the rubble and pebbles to fill in the deep ruts in the dirt road to their house.
She must have been exhausted so much of the time. I no longer wonder why she always seemed cranky. Why she hardly smiled. Why I didn’t think of her as a fun person, really.
Except for one night when my family was staying over for the weekend at their farm.
My Grandma Stella and Grandpa Herman were partnering with each other in a game of pinochle against my mother and father. They played on into the evening and grew very animated. We were all in the front room and I was watching television. Suddenly I heard Grandpa Herman slap his card down on their table with a loud guffaw of triumph. I looked up at them, surprised to see them laughing and smiling like I never had. It’s a special memory, seeing both their faces alight with pleasure and fun.
As I looked back at my grandma from adulthood, I began to realize how very important it was to her that there be some beauty in her life. When their lives grew a little easier financially, she collected pretty tea cups and saucers. I have one of her treasured cups and saucers. It is special to me. I am like her in my need for some beautiful things around to cheer me.
It was not all drudgery for her. Somehow she made the time for crocheting beautiful doilies. I have one of those too, and I love it. Despite needing to grow as many vegetables as possible to feed her large family, she made time to grow beautiful flowers. She especially loved daffodils. I believe she needed beauty to feed her spirit.
Speaking of spirit, although I don’t remember her ever talking about it, I was aware that she attended the Lutheran church, so I surmise her faith was important to her.
The secrets to her strength are beginning to come together for me.
Valuable survival lessons from my Grandmother
A person can read advice about becoming resilient and coping well when life knocks you down. But nothing makes a deeper impression than realizing you have been witnessing a truly strong woman in action. A woman who survived losing one great love and then a second, burying too many precious loved ones too young, and the daily, constant grinding down of poverty when there is never quite enough to eat and certainly never any sense of security. Being working poor means you are okay for the moment, but any setback at all can ruin you.
My Grandma Stella mastered survival. She bore up under duress. Here are the ways she did it.
- She grieved privately all her heart losses.
- She set that grief aside to keep putting one foot after another. She did chores and more chores.
- She did whatever she had to do and earned some money when it was her or no one to do it.
- She kept her faith in something or Someone greater and stronger than this world, and faith kept shoring up her own strength.
- She carved out time, and energy, for making things beautiful around her, not just functional. Thus she nurtured her spirit as well as her body.
- She cried while driving herself to get work done late at night.
- She balanced her life by taking time to laugh and revel in good times with loved ones.
- She was smart, knowing no one can do it all alone, and so she relied on others.
She understood she needed family, or rather they needed each other, to make it through. She received help from parents, neighbors, and her children. She was proud, and worked exceedingly hard, but accepted and returned support to keep the family going.
Her whole life became a worthy lesson. She persisted.
I am recommending
’s story The Garage Sale China Cat with Broken Pieces in the Memoirist Idol contest stories. I resonate with stories of much-loved objects that invoke special memories and I know the power of grief. Use this link to read her story.
