My Maternal Grandparents--A Love Story

Even though I never met my grandfathers, my Mam Maw and that side of the family were more demonstrative both in word and action about feelings, so I became aware that my Mam Maw and her husband were very much in love. She used to claim that her nose had been more pug before her husband spent years tweaking it lovingly every time he walked by. As a farmer, he was prone to head out to sales, etc on a moment’s notice as he heard about them. She and the 4 children would be ready to go anytime as she kept a suitcase packed with necessities for everyone. Keeping a suitcase packed and ready was her advice to my aunt when she married one of her sons.

As she got older, she would speak more frankly about things. At one time she commented about wishing it had been okay for a woman to enjoy sex when she was younger. Women were apparently taught that they were to do their “wifely duty” with no noticeable response in order to remain respectable. She obviously would have liked to have been able to show her husband how much she loved him in every facet of their lives.

When her youngest child was a toddler, my grandfather became quite ill. She and his brother (my Uncle Shelly) drove him to Mayo Clinic in Minnesota since the local doctor could not diagnose or treat the problem. It was advanced cancer, and he died with his head lying on her lap on the way home. As you can imagine, her life was quite hard after that—raising 4 children on her own during the depression. I regret now that I have so many holes in the story. We don’t realize what we would like to know about relatives until we are older and they are gone. I do know that she was married again briefly. I only know because I asked about her name on a book with a different surname. She explained that she had accepted a proposal from a man to try to better provide for her family, but he and his son’s were cruel. (His son had caused her son to fall from the barn roof, and her son died of a brain tumor a few years later???) She also indicated that she had a lot of shame over having gotten a divorce and would prefer to never speak of it again. We didn’t.