I never met my maternal grandmother, who died when my mother was only thirteen. But she continues to touch my life daily, in so many little ways. On All Soul’s day, the day of remembrance, I especially want to share about her.
The thought came to me as I was washing the breakfast dishes yesterday morning, when I pushed up my sweater sleeves to keep them from getting wet. Often as a child when I dried the dishes beside my mother, who washed them, she’d tell me what her mother taught her – that if you got your sleeves wet while doing dishes or slopped water on your clothes anywhere, you’d end up marrying a drunkard. Pushing my sleeves up always makes me think of both of them. And I didn’t marry a drunkard.
My grandmother is also always with me through her love of music, which she passed on to my mother. Having grown up attending a one room country school, my grandmother subsequently graduated from what was then called Normal School and taught in a country school for a few years before she married my grandfather. With some of her earnings, she purchased a Behr Brothers upright piano and moved it into the home my mother grew up in.
She taught my mother to read music, play the piano, and sight-sing. When I was about five, my mother had that piano moved to our house and let me start lessons.
Carrying my grandmother’s legacy forward, when my mother learned that public schools in our state no longer taught sight singing, she volunteered in my fifth grade year to teach our school glee club singers to sight read the songs, capped off by our performance on the local radio station that Christmas season.
Tiny threads, from so many people we have never met, have shaped us all into who we are today. I honor my grandmother and these threads on this day.