Where do I belong?

I have spent the first part of my life in the mountains of Appalachia.  Until the age of 6, I lived in Confluence, Pennsylvania.  We went to a little white Methodist Church, my grandmother and I, every Sunday.  After church, grandma would go grocery shopping, then she would go home.  She would have a roast or something in the oven already, because grandma was an excellent homemaker.  We would put up some of our groceries from the weeks haul, but at least half, we would repackage into new paper sacks.  One bag represented another family's food.

Grandma would haul 4-6 sacks of groceries into her big green Ford and put me in the back.  You see grandma was a land lady.  It wasn't the only thing she did, but it was one of her many businesses at 70 years old.  The woman was a brilliant business woman and financial accountant.  She would visit each of her rental properties with a sack of groceries in her hands.  She always made sure to add a bit of meat to each sack, usually a pound of hamburger, or a whole chicken.  Grandma would come in with the groceries and say, "I brought you a little something."  It was a way to break the ice since no one wants to see the land lady.  It was also a way to get in the house and see how they took care of her house.  However, grandma also said it was because she had never seen such poor people as lived in them hills.  She would remark when we left to my mother, "Take a notation of the little girl's shoe size.  She hasn't any and winter is coming."  Then the next time we came, grandma would have a pair of boots for the little girl, along with the sack of groceries.  That was how grandma was. 

Now often people didn't have the rent money.  Grandma lived through the Depression and tried to work with folks.  She often would give them two or three months to make any payment at all.  Still every month, bringing a sack of groceries.  If grandma showed up without a sack of groceries, it meant she was giving you one last warning before eviction.  She was patient.  Patient to the point of saintliness.  I remember one woman kept coming up short.  Her husband was an alcoholic and drank the money away.  Grandma had a soft spot for such women, because she too had suffered through a marriage with a man that liked to drink.  I remember this woman crying, "Oh please Mary, I can't be on the street with the children.  Please Mary, I will work for you, just let the children in for the winter."  It made me so sad to see this woman begging because her husband drank up all the money two nights before.  She didn't even have money for food.  It touched grandma's heart too.

She told the woman, "You get rid of your no good husband and I will find plenty of work for you and food too."  The woman had to call the cops on her husband several times till they kept him in jail, but she got rid of him.  Grandma kept her word too.  The woman was a seamstress.  She sewed me all sorts of handmade dresses.  For six months grandma kept this arrangement.  I would get a new dress or two every month with fabric grandma bought.  The lady had a place to stay for one more month and a sack of groceries.  Then the woman got some sort of welfare and just paid grandma rent.  After that, their lives were good for a while, until she took her husband back.  Right about when my mother was moving away grandma had to kick the woman and her husband out for non-payment of rent.  I remember grandma saying, "Now I gave you a chance.  The rent must be paid or your just gonna have to move."  My uncle Bud is the one that went with the sheriff to evict them though.  It was too stressful for grandma because she knew that woman could have had a good life without that man.

Grandma was no slacker just collecting rent and going to church.  Sundays were for visiting but the rest of the days of the week were for working.  Even on Saturday she worked.  She woke up before the sun, cooked three meals every day, changed the linens once a week, swept, and dusted, and did dishes three times a day.  She did all that and had a garden, canned, made sausage, cookies, noodles, and much more. 

After I got sick and had to have treatment at Children's, she spent money to help a friend of mine get a bone marrow transplant.  She also gave six months living expenses to a widow of a young man that died of cancer.  When she found out how dangerous cancer was because of what happened with me, she took it upon herself to try and save as many local people as she could by paying for or raising money for them to get treatment.  Back then, cancer was a death sentence unless you had money.  Even cancers that could be treated, most just died from for lack of funding. 

In the end, grandma was consumed by the cancer she fought for almost a decade.  She caught lung cancer that spread to her brain.  I begged grandma not to go.  I didn't understand why she was leaving because I was only seven when she passed.  I still remember her waking up at 2 am to melt cheese on top of crackers because I cried I was hungry.  She was my first motherly love.  She loved me enough to sacrifice, at even 70, to help me feel loved.  She was a shining example of what a woman could be.  I hope to honor her memory by the time I am old and near my grave with my life, though I feel I will fall far short.