That little girl on a TV Western, the one that ends with her frolicking in a meadow, wearing a pioneer dress circa 1907—she is my grandmother. We called her Maw Maw, so named when her first grandchild could not say ‘grandma.’ Like all grandmothers, she once was a young vibrant girl, maybe not so much carefree given the times. Her name was Rosa, named after her father’s most beautiful girlfriend, he would joke, referring to the woman he married. Rosa was raised with a bunch of rowdy older brothers. They gave her a nickname not fit to be printed here. That’s how sexist they were, perhaps all males at the turn of the 20th century. She was born in 1901 in Indian Territory, soon to be renamed Oklahoma. She called it God’s country.
Her family was apparently homeless, traveling in a covered wagon along dirt roads and through wild terrain town to town. Perhaps they were day laborers. The wagon could not hold all of them, so each one had to take turns walking alongside the horse-drawn transportation. Maw Maw told the time when her dad finally saved enough money to buy a plot of land, but his sons defied him and wouldn’t let him. So he didn’t make the purchase, and according to her, not too long after that property was found to have oil.
She taught herself to ride a horse, a scene in which her brothers busted out laughing, claiming girls can’t ride horses. She showed them. By the time she was of a young lady, she was raising chickens, a trade she’d continue through the 1960s. I recall dilapidated stacked coops behind her house, adjacent to a large vegetable garden. But the Maw Maw I knew was getting too old to deal with feisty feathered friends. Even gardening, always while wearing a hand-made bonnet to avoid the sun, was hard on her bones. Besides, the times were changing. Townsfolk weren’t allowed to keep a bunch of chickens and coops due to mandated sanitation standards. A small grocery store had opened just a short walk from Maw Maw’s house. She had to cross a major highway to get to the store. Fortunately, the highway running through Maw Maw’s sleepy town was rarely busy, so not only could she manage the occasional walk, her grandkids merrily volunteered to run to the store and gather her list of foodstuffs.
Maw Maw was an excellent country cook, never using a recipe, her specialty buttery soft yeast rolls. Mmm. She could sew, too, making good use of flour sack cloth to dress her young’uns, even sewed my dad’s blue jeans. And, of course, she was a quilter. She gave me one when I went off to college. I keep it stored in a cedar chest just like she would have done during the summer.
She married young and started having kids. I wonder if she were old enough to vote when women finally were granted that right in 1920. She raised chickens and vegetables and taught her eight kids to do the same. Their daily chores, as my dad recalled, included milking a cow and chopping wood. In those years, the family lived isolated in the country. But their house was not their own. Paw Paw plowed the land as sort of a sharecropper’s deal.
When the Depression hit, my young adult grandparents got religion along with millions of Americans in the rural South. Prior to that, they attended outdoor dances where they’d uncomfortably watch drinking turn into brawling. Maw Maw was a musician, playing what she called the French Harp, which is a harmonica. She may have had other musical abilities like piano and guitar because several of her children were musically inclined. But the family left all ‘worldliness’ in the past; any music would be strictly gospel. And they lived a holiness lifestyle in dress and deed for decades, ruled by the dogged determination of the family matriarch.
Maw Maw was not even 5 feet tall with petite features. How did a little woman with raven hair and blue eyes come across as the Mother of all mothers? But her kids would mind her in fear as those were the days parents would hit their kids and yell at them for misbehaving. She only had an 8th grade education. But in her day, prior to a world war, high school was not required. She read the Bible more than any other book. She actually studied it. And whenever the church doors were open, her entire family was there, even if it meant throwing a quilt on the floor for a new babe to sleep.
She lived a long time, surviving Paw Paw’s death at old age. I remember their 50th wedding anniversary, probably in 1968. All her kids and grandkids crowded into their wood-frame house. During the festivities, an aunt placed an empty tissue box on my head and a cousin, telling us we’d be the flower girls in a pretend wedding ceremony. It seemed the entire town dropped by to congratulate my grandparents’ monumental anniversary.
Maw Maw would go down in family history as the talker, the social one. Paw Paw preferred to take to his room and sit in his rocking chair whenever friends or family dropped by. He was more content to listen than speak, maybe his way of avoiding disputes. Maw Maw and Paw Paw had separate bedrooms after the birth of their last child, when she was 42. This was not uncommon for their generation. But after Paw Paw died and Maw Maw had to get used to living in their house alone, one night she heard him calling her from his bedroom. She opened the door and slipped into his empty bed. That became her bedroom.
Almost a decade later, Maw Maw had a stroke when she was 81. She never recovered, remaining bedridden and incapacitated for five long years. Before the stroke, she always expressed her greatest fear: having a stroke and lingering for years in a nursing home. Family made sure she remained in her own home, her daughters and nieces taking turns caring for her every day, never leaving her alone at night. She couldn’t talk anymore but to anyone who dropped by to visit, she’d greet with a very tight grip. Capturing us by the hand, she’d look deep into our eyes. She was desperately trying to tell us something. What could it have been? “Help me!” maybe? I’d rather think “I love you!” Perhaps simply “Love!”
She passed away on the afternoon of the Challenger explosion. Maw Maw never believed man walked on the moon. Those thoughts of certainty were her charm. Throughout her life—a link to our pioneering forefathers—Rosa was self sufficient; surviving childhood diseases and worldwide financial crises; able to live off the land; believing in the good earth; knowing from the soul despite any appearance to the contrary, God provides all needs and leaves no one forsaken.