Who Was She?

Born in 1903 into a childhood that was a blur of hard work on a farm in Walker County, Texas. Her daily chores included helping her mother with three older brothers and one older sister, then taking care of a new baby sister and much later, another brother. Kitchen work with wood stove for cooking, bringing water from their well, scrubbing floors, washing clothes outside on wash boards, hanging clothes out to dry on long clothes lines with clothes pins, no indoor plumbing, learning to read, write, and do arithmetic in a one-room school house when she was allowed to go for the lessons.

Social activities included getting dressed up with the rest of her family and going to church in a horse and buggy driven by her father. Her mother sat erect next to her father and seemed to have an imperious air which she told her children came from her side of their family.

Married at fifteen to a neighboring “older” guy of twenty years. One of her brothers had married his sister. Years later one of her sisters married a different brother. Both families had farmed the land of Walker County, Texas, for two generations in the neighboring farm lands. Their children became good friends and eventually married to escape the challenges of farm life only to discover the reality of life without the safety net of the farm.

She moved several times with her new husband who wasn’t inclined to do farm work. He worked for a while at the largest employer in their part of Texas: the State Prison farms and jails. Her husband carried a pistol for the time that he was a prison guard. She didn’t like that for a lot of reasons, but the biggest one was she didn’t want one of her children to get hurt. She had a daughter when she was eighteen years old, a son when she was nineteen years old, and another son when she was twenty-one years old. She found that having three children of her own so close together made her more sympathetic for her mother’s assignment of tasks when she lived at home as a child.

Her younger son also married at a very young age when he returned from serving in the Army Air Corps in WWII. He was twenty years of age, and his bride was eighteen. They had their only child when his wife was nineteen, and he was twenty-one. They were too young, but what could she say?

She was my grandmother, Betha Day Robinson Morris. She was born on October 23, 1903. Tomorrow she would have been 123 years old; however, she died from heart complications on May 28, 1983.

What’s odd about looking back on her life, I feel almost guilty for my indoor plumbing, taking showers when she never had anything except a small bath tub and a kitchen pot to run water in and then pour over her head. My washing machine and dryer. My dishwasher. Furniture. Television set that’s large enough for four of hers. Netflix, et. al. Cell phones v. sharing a party line with my maternal grandmother. Uber. Instacart. Don’t even mention the swimming pool and granddaughters’ playhouse in our back yard.

She wrote me a letter every Monday morning when I moved away from my home town, come rain or shine, and I casually tossed them in the trash. What I wouldn’t give for them today. Mostly, I miss sitting at her small round table in the kitchen where we always ate every meal except on holidays. She would regale me and my grandfather with hilarious tales of gossip about her friends, family, neighbors, churchgoers, and customers from their small cleaning and pressing shop next to my grandfather’s barber shop in the little town of Richards, which was fewer than thirty miles from where she grew up.

There are many Texas storytellers but none any better than my grandmother who sits on her steps between my grandfather and her daughter who is holding her granddaughter in the picture above. I love this family picture because my grandmother is smiling and looks so happy as she interacts with one of her grandsons. I learned to listen, and I learned to love words from this woman who had her flaws but whose living example instilled courage in me to discover who I became.