Granny Walker

My great-grandmother was born on June 14, 1910 in Oklahoma. She didn’t knit and everything that she cooked was fried in a vat of grease until it was hard and tough, or possibly burned. I figure that my grandmother learned how to cook out of sheer desperation. Even though she couldn’t cook, my Granny could create a pattern for anything after viewing the finished garment. And she did. When my grandmother (who was born in 1930) was young, Granny used to make her clothes out of cloth flour sacks. My whole life I remember that she had an old, black, manual sewing machine set up in her living room, right in front of a window. During the depression, she picked cotton for a living and earned about 25 cents a day.

When my mother was growing up, she went to live with Granny Walker when she was sixteen. At the time, my mother and father were dating, and my father was allowed to come over once a week (on Sunday) and take my mother for a drive. When I was born my mother and father were living in a double-wide trailer on her property. I saw Granny Walker practically every day of my life from the time I was born until I was almost four and we moved. My mother cleaned and cooked for her as she was unable to do very well for herself. She loved me, her first grandchild, and she made me many things. Two of my most prized possessions are a two-headed doll that she sewed for me, even going so far as to embroider on the face, and a baby doll that she crocheted.

After we moved I only saw Granny Walker about once a year when we would go to visit her. Then when I was seven, she died.

When she died my mother inherited some of her furniture, including a lamp and a vanity. When Stephen and I bought our house it was at the same time that my parents were renovating theirs and they were looking to get rid of things that they didn’t need. That’s how I ended up with the vanity and the lamp. Up until last weekend, the lamp had an honored place in my living room and the vanity was being stored in my basement. But last weekend we decided to change one of our rooms, the guest bedroom. So, we moved out the furniture that we had in the room, painted the room a pale yellow (we had painted it red when we moved in) and moved the lamp and the vanity into the room.

I think it’s nice.