Grandmothers

Life was different in the middle of the twentieth century. The extended family was a big feature for me and many others.

Hair color and cookies express (for me) the way they were. Two grandmothers, both very different and alike in some ways, but both good people. They were my grandmothers. To Eddy, David and me, one was Grandma and one was Sweetie Pie. We had them in our lives for a long time, and they both departed this life in the 1970s.

Sweetie Pie was glamorous; no one knew the actual color of her hair until she forgot to color it very late in life. Grandma was old fashioned with gray hair. But hair isn’t everything. At least they both had theirs.

Both made delicious cookies; Sweetie Pie’s chocolate chip cookies were the best, and she made sure to make some when we visited her. Grandma’s pinwheel cookies were equally good, and I associate them with the Christmas season.

From there they diverged. Grandma was married to Grandpa for many years, while Sweetie Pie and my other grandfather divorced after a short marriage, when people weren’t supposed to get divorces. Grandma lived in her home in Oak Park with Aunt Lina after Grandpa died, and Sweetie Pie lived in apartments in Rochester and Chicago while she worked for her living in a record store. My parents moved the two of them to Sturgeon Bay to be with us later in their lives. Needless to say, they didn’t live together.

On occasional weekends when we stayed with Grandma, she took Eddy, David and me to the Lutheran Church were we sat in the balcony and enjoyed sitting up high more than the service. She also had my brothers and me read the Bible together at bedtime, whether we wanted to or not. Sweetie Pie, an Episcopalian, didn’t go to church and didn’t have space for us to stay in her apartment. At one time my parents, brothers and I lived with Grandma for several months in Oak Park while waiting to move into a new home after we sold our house in Park Ridge.  She walked around the house wringing her hands and saying, “Oh dear, oh dear.” It must have stressed Grandma a bit because Grandpa hadn’t been dead for very long and she had the five of us there disrupting her previously quiet life.

Sweetie Pie and I lived in Milwaukee at the same time during the first year of my marriage to Rick. I got to know her better during that time. We ate dinner together frequently, and Rick, the tall guy, changed her light bulbs without a ladder. She was a full time babysitter then for a young boy, and I was working on my BA at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Rick and Sweetie Pie flirted with one another and got along well. Our time there ended when Rick and I moved to Sturgeon Bay after I got my degree and he started working for my father in the radio station.

In Sturgeon Bay, every now and then I walked a couple of miles to Grandma’s house in town from our little home on Cherry Road. Once when I was there, Aunt Lina, who still lived with Grandma, told me I shouldn’t walk that far because I was pregnant and I could lose my baby. She was concerned; it never occurred to me that walking would be dangerous. Grandma was old and sick by then, and Aunt Lina stayed with her until she died.  After my Dede was born in Sturgeon Bay, Sweetie Pie babysat her in her first year on the occasions when I needed the help.

This is a picture of the extended family caring across the generations. The intertwined lives of the extended family have gradually gone away for many Americans. I am glad that our extended family, small as it was, grew together over the years. I loved my two grandmothers.