Unearthing a life.....

Paternal Grandmother Galena 'Lena' Belle

Granted, Mother's day is a bit off yet, but writers in search of titles must grab any reasonable straw that floats by. Or, in this case, the first straw that floats by.

I was thinking of the process that put me here on this happy earth and the women who went through the pains of childbirth to form my paternal line. There have been a number of them that I've become acquainted with during my genealogical researches:

Olive Newsome ... back in pre-Revolutionary times.

Nancy Abernathy ... who nurtured the line from South Carolina to Tennessee to Missouri.

Margaret McDaniel ... mothering the line from Missouri to Kansas.

Rachel Barnes ... from Kansas to Oregon to Washington.

Galena Belle Gilbert ... a California girl transplanted to a Washington hard-scrabble homestead.

Lucile Roach ... also known to me as 'Mom'.

Grandma Lena was probably the 'woman of influence' in my very early years. From what I have gleaned from old tales, my Mom was not noticeably ready for full time motherhood when I was born in 1934. I understand that my parents received several sets of dishes as wedding presents. The number 6 sticks in my mind. When all the dishes in the house were dirty, grandmothers Lena and Katie would converge on the place and get them all clean and back into the cupboards.

Grandma Lena lived just across a small empty lot from my Dad's house. She was the close-at-hand grandma. There have also been hints that she did not totally approve of Dad's choice of mate. So she had a tendency to step in and fill the gaps when it came to child rearing.

Whenever conversation drifted around to these times, Mom would roll her eyes and say, "Oh, she had you kids trained alright. Every morning you were over there lined up like hungry birds on her doorstep ... while she spooned in the cod liver oil and gave you your jelly glasses of orange juice."

According to Uncle Don, Grandma Lena would not suffer any alcohol on the place. A regular Carrie Nation. The boys would hide jugs of cider and grape juice in hopes that it would ferment. "I think she could smell it turn," claims Don, "because she always found it and dumped it before we could get a swig."

Many of my early memories ate connected to Grandma Lena: the sound of the butter churn and the taste of fresh buttermilk; The Guiding Light and Stella Dallas on the radio; the smell of dill in her garden; the sight of headless chickens flopping helter-skelter behind the woodshed; gathering big wire baskets of eggs from under raucous hens; the taste of dill pickles stolen from her crock.

I have no such homespun memories of my Mom from those times. Only memories of traveling the backroads in the Chevy while she ran Dad's trap lines during the days ... shooting caught coyotes and the occasional badger and lashing them to the fenders and bumpers. It only just occured to me that we must have been a strange sight driving home through Othello. Kids on the inside, varmints on the outside. A strange sight nowadays, but probably unremarkable back then in the mid '30's.

Mother Lucile 'Alyene'
(circa 1932 - hand tinted)

# posted by Clear Creek Girl : 10:23 AM