Great grandmothers are often left to sit and rock smiling in their chairs in the back room. These ladies are what you were genetically, that became part of you. I knew only my grandmother, not my great grandmothers who came from other places. I was able to speak and live with, for a time, my grandmother, the Canadian one. I am ninety and lived in the latter grandmother's home during a young adult time that my sister, I and my grandmother were all engaged to be married. Believe it or not! My other foreign grandmother who was also Canadian and came to this county at the beginning of the last century as a young woman as yet to be married, was from Hungary but of German descent. She was too embarrassed to speak her own languages. We simply called her Gramma and took her for granted. She was, in real life, a farm woman with a rather harsh husband, my grandfather, a prize winning horseman and a strict model of what true hard work means. Gramma had a garden in front of her house that was as big as an average building lot in the city. She had only her own time to work on it, outside gathering eggs, cooking for eight to ten or whomever stopped by the farm, helping grampa with everything he asked her to do, milking the cows, feeding the pigs and canning, baking and cooking everything from scratch. She had no electricity, only cold running water and a humble house. Grampa had the leather rocking chair. We didn't notice if ever she sat down on anything. She was part of the scene only. Her garden was perfect, not a weed. In it was every and any vegetable, fruit and vine. She seldom spoke. We learned nothing about her past, only that her father was a magistrate. That's all; and now she is gone. Speak to your grandparents and know where you came from. It made you. It is a gift.
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