![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Happy 100th birthday, Grandma!
Mar. 14th, 2009 08:38 pmMy grandma, Dorothy Kenyon, was born on March 14th, 1909, near Kooskia, Idaho. Her father's family (Shaw) were Idaho pioneers, and her mother's family (Scott) were Oregon pioneers, all of them farmers. Grandma was mostly raised by her Scott grandparents, after her parents' divorce, when her unaccountably vain mother decided that single motherhood didn't suit her. Grandma went to teacher's college, and married Grandpa Ben. They bought a house on the end of Elmore Street in Lebanon, Oregon, during the Great Depression, and Grandma taught school and had two children, my mom and my late uncle Larry.
When I dream of my family's house, it is usually this one. My dad liked to move to a different house every few years, so the house in Lebanon was the most constant physical home of my childhood. They had a big lawn, mostly shaded by a crabapple and a walnut tree, a huge vegetable garden, a big fenced yard for Grandpa's chickens and pigeons, and an orchard. Grandma worked just as hard in the summer as she did during the school year, hoeing and watering and harvesting and canning, or "putting up," as she called it. Her pantry and enclosed back porch were full of mason jars of peaches, cherries, applesauce, pears, tomatoes, green beans, crabapple jelly, raspberries, boysenberries, loganberries, and "black caps" (black raspberries), along with bags of walnuts and filberts, and her freezers were packed with corn and pint after pint of sliced strawberries, which they also harvested from U-pick farms.
The flowers were amazing too. There was a rose garden on the west side of the house and hydrangeas in the shade on the east. A big row of peonies lined the driveway, and the far flower beds were filled with lilacs, irises, oriental poppies, and every color of broom. Her nemesis was the white morning glory that threatened to take over the vegetable beds.
What else? Grandma taught first and second grades at Crowfoot School 'til she retired. She watched game shows, All My Children, and Jack LaLane, and she loved her Siamese cats. She collected plates, vinegar cruets, and costume jewelry, and she was ever grateful when the day came that teachers were allowed to wear pant suits to school. She kept a notebook by her chair and noted every cent she'd saved with coupons, which some attributed to her Scottish ancestry but I think was a habit learned in lean times. She outlived my grandpa by about seven years and died when she was about 75, from heart disease. When I was a toddler she said, "Oh my goodness!" so often that I called her "Grandma Goodness," and that's how we always knew her. Happy birthday, Grandma Goodness!
When I dream of my family's house, it is usually this one. My dad liked to move to a different house every few years, so the house in Lebanon was the most constant physical home of my childhood. They had a big lawn, mostly shaded by a crabapple and a walnut tree, a huge vegetable garden, a big fenced yard for Grandpa's chickens and pigeons, and an orchard. Grandma worked just as hard in the summer as she did during the school year, hoeing and watering and harvesting and canning, or "putting up," as she called it. Her pantry and enclosed back porch were full of mason jars of peaches, cherries, applesauce, pears, tomatoes, green beans, crabapple jelly, raspberries, boysenberries, loganberries, and "black caps" (black raspberries), along with bags of walnuts and filberts, and her freezers were packed with corn and pint after pint of sliced strawberries, which they also harvested from U-pick farms.
The flowers were amazing too. There was a rose garden on the west side of the house and hydrangeas in the shade on the east. A big row of peonies lined the driveway, and the far flower beds were filled with lilacs, irises, oriental poppies, and every color of broom. Her nemesis was the white morning glory that threatened to take over the vegetable beds.
What else? Grandma taught first and second grades at Crowfoot School 'til she retired. She watched game shows, All My Children, and Jack LaLane, and she loved her Siamese cats. She collected plates, vinegar cruets, and costume jewelry, and she was ever grateful when the day came that teachers were allowed to wear pant suits to school. She kept a notebook by her chair and noted every cent she'd saved with coupons, which some attributed to her Scottish ancestry but I think was a habit learned in lean times. She outlived my grandpa by about seven years and died when she was about 75, from heart disease. When I was a toddler she said, "Oh my goodness!" so often that I called her "Grandma Goodness," and that's how we always knew her. Happy birthday, Grandma Goodness!