Remain Imperfect

I miss my grandmother.  My maternal grandmother gave me my real name, Margaret, twice baked potatoes, her warm lap, & a Southern sensibility.  She was raised in Tennessee, attended Tennessee State Teacher's College in the 1930s, was an orphan by her first year in college after her mother committed suicide and her father had a heart attack.  She gave birth to my mother while living with her Aunt Izzy in Chattanooga, TN.  My grandfather remained in the South Pacific during World War II for two years.  Upon his return they raised both my mother & uncle in Atlanta, GA.

She was pretty great.

& kind of a mess.

I always felt closest to her.  She loved literature like I did.  When she caught me staying up past my bedtime to read she told me that she used to hide in the barn to sneak novels.  She read "Gone with the Wind" staying up one entire night.  In her later years she read crate fulls of Harlequin romances.  Upon completion she donated them to her church.  I heard her tell my Mom that if she'd discovered them 50 years earlier she would have given my grandfather "a much better time of it."

Because I wanted her to be a pure link to a family that didn't always know how to hold close it's own, I often ascribed qualities and values to her, without sufficient knowledge about her true feeling and inclinations.  Towards the end of her life I wanted to know her a bit better and asked more questions.  Truthfully, her own sensibilities were pretty divergent from mine.  It makes sense.  She was raised in an entirely different era. During the Great Depression she became an orphan and watched her four younger siblings be sent to family members throughout the country.  She married my grandfather, who had a pretty severe, though undiagnosed, struggle with bipolar disorder.

I miss her.  Recently, I find myself reminiscing about her & once more casting her in a nostalgic mold of the woman I wanted her to be.  & I find that to be such a disservice.  It's not true that she was an infallible role model for me.  It's not true that she always loved & supported me fully-- she wasn't loved & supported fully by those nearest to her either.  She loved & supported me as best she was able.  She was truly smart, funny, & curious about the world.  She was also ambitious for her children and grandchildren.  She was honestly mystified that I would want to grow food, limit my interactions with technology, and not seek an exorbitant income.  She cared greatly for status and public perception.  But she also grabbed Kevin's ass (literally!) when the mood took her at age 90.  Kevin had to pry her off.

Her sister Lillian died tragically while honeymooning at Niagara Falls.  She said her mother passed from the "change," meaning menopause, but as I aged she shared that her mother hung herself in the barn.  She told me her family were farmers, but I learned later that her Dad was on the board of the local bank & the farm was worked by white sharecroppers.  They tried to hire "help" from the nearby Black community, but no one would work for them given that there was still a slave auction block stone on their property.  It was said that when it rained you could see slaves' blood staining the stone.  The family instead hired poor whites as domestic help.

Her story is richer because it's messy.  I'd rather know honestly who I am, and honestly where I come from, than create fiction.  She told me her grandfather didn't much acknowledge her or any of his grandkids.  She didn't know whether her knew her name because he called them all "Cracker."  She remembered him and the other men digging up sasparilla root to make sodas and tea.  She and her sister, Katherine, remained close.  They would cook sugar over an open flame to make caramel, and then eat it out of the pan.

She never told me much about her mother, other than that she too loved reading and music.  She played the piano in the barn so the kids could dance.  She remembered her father fondly.  She tried to help him sow the potato crop one year.  She incorrectly sliced the potatoes, dissecting the eyes, and waited for him to return home so she could proudly show her work.  Effectively, she had cost him a lot of money, time, and food by her mistake.  He never scolded nor chastised her.  Quietly, with a smile, and by example, he showed her how to do it correctly, and thanked her for her efforts.

This photo was taken soon after my grandmother passed.  Kevin & I flew to Atlanta to help close her apartment.  Afterwards we drove her car to Savannah, where this photo was taken.

I want to be a woman who can smile, 70 years later, at learning from her own mistakes.  I want to be a woman who is flawed, emerging from muddied history, and reaching towards clarity.