final goodbyes in Rosenberg

my grandmother Louise (second from top left) with her Schlinke family

outside their Rosenberg home in 1917

matriarch Selma Buls Schlinke seated, pregnant with last baby Mary Ellen

Louise and Mr. Boring with their first child, James Marion Boring, Jr.

Widowed in 1938 at forty years of age with four children to support, debts to pay, the Great Depression in full swing, a third grade education, living in rural Grimes County, Texas where opportunities for employment were limited – my maternal grandmother Louise waged a private war against poverty, loneliness and depression for many of her remaining years. In 1948 my mother, father and I moved in with my grandmother to share expenses and me; we lived with her for eleven years until I was thirteen years old. I believe selfishly those were the happiest years of her life because they were some of the happiest years of mine, and when we moved 125 miles south to Brazoria, the old enemies she had fought for most of her life reappeared to haunt her home. She didn’t have a car and wouldn’t know how to drive one if she did.

my grandmother Louise Schlinke Boring (r) with her immediate family

mother of four, grandmother of six at Schlinke family reunion in Houston circa 1962

As Fate would have it, or when the vicissitudes of life played tricks on us according to my daddy, no matter where you ride to, that’s where you are. My mama and daddy moved to Rosenberg, Texas as soon as I started college at the University of Texas in the summer of 1964. My grandmother Louise had been in and out of mental hospitals for years when she moved to Rosenberg to live with my parents in 1971 following my mother’s exasperation with her mother who she felt could be fine if she just had “somthing to do.” My grandmother died in a hospital in Rosenberg in April, 1972 – she had come full circle to the place where she had been born. Since I had used my savings to make the plane trip from Seattle to Houston at Christmas for the holidays the previous December, I didn’t have the money to fly home for her funeral which was on my twenty-sixth birthday. I was heartbroken for the loss and for not being there when she needed me.

Lots of love, Mother

This coming Friday, October 20th. is my grandmother’s birthday, and I remember her for the unconditional love she gave me for as long as she lived. She was kind, compassionate, caring and a strong woman who refused to allow the old devil to defeat her faith. I honor her every time I tell my granddaughters how much I love them.

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For all the grieving children everywhere.