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| My Granny Martha Bridget Rhody Bartley |
Lets start with Sol and Gertrude. No they did not live near me. In fact Gertrude did not live at all in my lifetime. She died when Daddy was a boy and I never met her, though in a weird way I feel very connected to her through her quilt which I have inherited. I did get to visit her grave in West Plains a few years ago when Daddy's brother Dale joined me there for a family reunion. He drove us all over the countryside showing us places and telling us stories. Gertrude is buried in a beautiful little cemetery in the woods, and I wonder if I could have ever found it on my own.
I did meet Grandpa Sol though and remember being given a ride on his tractor. He lived in Oklahoma and we lived in New Mexico. I only remember making the trip to see him one time, but I do remember that trip, we saw a longhorn steer in a pasture and Daddy stopped to pick cotton bolls out of a field for Jamie and me to play with. We could see them whizzing by as we drove down the highway and we desperately wanted to have one to look at. I remember being astonished at his daring, picking cotton bolls right out of a field that was not his own! That is about all I can recall about my encounter with my grandpa Sol. I am left with the vague impression that I liked him. I was a highly sensitive child and if he did something to upset me, or that I didn't like I would have remembered it.
My memories of PaPa and Granny are far more elaborate since I spent much more time with them. They lived in Amarillo, only two hours from our home in Clovis, so we went to Amarillo frequently, and they came to see us too, though not as often. There was a convenience store across the street from Granny and Papa's house on Taylor Street and PaPa would give us each a quarter to spend on candy whenever we came for a visit. They took us to Thompson park Zoo and Wonderland Amusement park...trips to Granny and PaPas were almost always fun. Granny's back yard was a little paradise that we loved to play in, and her front porch had a swing to loll on when it was too hot to do anything else but wait for a breeze. Whenever we were leaving to go out we always had to wait for Granny to catch the weather report on TV. This was before the days of 24/7 news and weather coverage. You had to catch the News at noon, the evening news or the late night news or not at all. As a child I never understood what the big deal was but later learned she was making sure we were not headed straight into a tornadic thunderstorm. Growing up in the Texas plains I guess she had her share of tornado scares.
We actually spent the most time with Granny not just because she lived the longest, but because she actually moved in with us for a while. I don't remember how long she stayed, maybe a year or so? I do remember that she was in our house when I was in the third grade because that is when I came down with the chicken pox and was sent home from school. I got to go home because Granny was there, otherwise I would have had to languish in the nurses office until Mom could come get me.
It did not last long, Granny's time living with us. We did not know it then, but she and Mom were not able to live together, Granny unwilling to see Mom as an adult, and Mom, then in her thirties, not willing to explain her every move to her mother. Jamie and I were blissfully unaware of the discord, they did a good job of keeping it out of our world. All we knew was that Granny made the best pickles ever from the cucumbers she grew in the yard and that every Thursday night we could pile into Granny's room and watch Barnaby Jones with her, and I am glad to have a happy memory of that time. She moved from our house to live near her other daughter, my Aunt Peggy in what was soon to become our vacation Hot spot, Dallas Texas. I have it on good authority that there will be more on that subject soon.
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