International Women's Day

I'm sure I've put up this picture of my grandmother and me on the porch swing of their home. I  love it, and the expressions speak for themselves. Grandma taught me to knit, and I think my latent interest in quilting must have come from her also, because I inherited several quilts made by her.

The other important woman in my life was my mother who I have also written about before, but my entry about her can be found.here

Grandma was the daughter of a judge and grew up in San Luis Obispo with four sisters, and it is said that they rode horses with the daughters of the Hearst family (before the castle) ranch in nearby San Simeon. She graduated from The University of California in 1899 when there were only two buildings, North Hall and South Hall, on the campus, and there were no eucalyptus trees in the Berkeley hills. I still have her diploma on the wall.

She was a vicar's wife. My grandfather was the pastor of the Red Bluff First Presbyterian Church, but by the time I came on the scene, Grandpa had retired and they had moved to their summer home in Mount Hermon, California. We would drive from Altadena through the Central Valley a couple of times a year to see them. The drive always involved strategies for avoiding the summer heat. Sometimes the parents would turn the back seat into a bed for my brother and me and we would drive through the night.There was always a discussion at someplace called Blackwell's Corner about which route to take, the shorter hotter, or the longer cooler one. I can still hear my father saying 'the die is cast' in somber tones once the decision had been made. These are all things we barely think about now in these days of air conditioned cars.

Grandma's domain was a child's paradise, although I suspect there were undercurrents  between my parents about whether Grandma and Grandpa could continue to stay there on their own. I, however, spent my days fishing for crawdads and looking for newts in Bean Creek, mastering the barefoot walk through the back yard overgrown with brambles, walking into the little town of Fulton for ice cream, and enjoying soup in the Quimper bowls with a picture of a French peasant in the bottom of the bowl. We always had to finish our soup to find out if we got the man or the woman.

Grandma was always around orchestrating things, cooking or canning  reading a book, or just sitting on the porch swing with me.   She died of heart failure a few years after this picture was taken,  Grandpa moved to Pasadena, and the house at Mount Hermon was sold, but she left quite a legacy and many memories behind.