My Grandmother

Dianne Russell Kidder’s Voices of Maine column for Augusta

Dynamo’s quirks make sense to granddaughter now

My grandmother was very cute.

I think I’m the only one in the world who would call her cute. Her children (my mother and identical twin uncles) held her in such high regard she was practically canonized in their eyes. When her children were all under 5 years old, she became a young widow, and she raised them single-handedly during the Depression with her job as a teacher and then superintendent of county schools in Randolph County, Ark. The latter position required that she be voted in, time after time, usually running against ambitious men.

As for the rest of her world, folks regarded her as an elegant lady. She had immaculate grooming, lovely clothes and absolutely perfect posture at all times. I used to swear she had a steel rod down her spine. I thought her more “Victorian” than Queen Victoria herself. She was almost always calm, private, somewhat detached, gracious and positive, and she never said a bad word about anyone. She also didn’t speak unless she had something of value to say.

Because we have long generations in my family, Nanno was almost 60 when I was born. I only knew her with a lovely full head of gray hair and retirement activities as her agenda. She definitely had a love of travel, which seems to move its way through all the generations of my family. She had many friends, both in Arkansas and later in California.

Slam, bang

Nanno was pragmatic down to her bone marrow. Interesting, because she lived most of her life with an emotion-driven romantic, my mother. I was an emotion-driven pragmatist. I guess that fits.

I only knew Nanno to get really angry one time in all my growing-up years. My girlfriend was staying overnight, we were in junior high and, as Nanno got up in the morning, she realized we’d been up all night. We hadn’t done anything wrong, it just seemed like a fun adventure and challenge. Nanno yelled something, I can’t remember what because I was immediately in shock, and I think she slammed something down on the table and stormed out. I never really knew what made her so angry; I guess it was the incomprehensible senselessness of wasting a good night’s sleep.

I only knew Nanno to get upset with herself once. She had entered the living room where Mother was having a bridge group of eight people, and asked, “Well, is everybody winning?” Again, her logical side knew immediately that that was impossible, and she felt foolish.

I was always amazed that Nanno and Mother, who were from the South, and were of older generations, did not have a racist thought, word or deed. I was proud of this and wondered if the bigotry they saw around them in Arkansas in those days hurt their souls as it did mine; I imagine it did.

Now, why do I call this regal woman “cute”? Well, for one thing, she took many adult education classes, including ceramics. From the first day of that class, we suddenly had all sorts of really strange little frogs and lily ponds and such all over our house. (They didn’t use molds, but developed clay from scratch.) My mother and I loved them, just because they were so odd and thus so poignantly incongruous with my grandmother, and with the rest of our house.

Save that soap

And she resurrected what must have been her Depression-era skills of taking all our leftover soap pieces and melting them down into awful soap bars that wouldn’t lather up, no matter how hard you scrubbed. Ditto leftover candle pieces that either failed to light at all, or sputtered out two minutes into the light. (I resisted the urge to remind Nanno that we weren’t still in the Depression; we could afford soap and candles.)

And she valiantly tried to become a good cook. Bless her, she and I are surely alike in this regard. My mother, a gourmet cook who could conquer any recipe, once said to me, “You and your grandmother cannot cook anything decent because you cannot follow a recipe to save your souls, and you leave in the middle and burn your food.” One uncle used to tease, “I knew when it was time to get up in the morning when I heard Mother scraping the burned toast.”

I can now see that Nanno was at the stage of her life where she was trying all the things she had always wanted to try but never had the time. Hey, I’m there now. I get it.

Of course, I loved her more than she ever knew. We are more alike than I realized; she always said we were. I wish we could hang out as peers now, except she would have a really hard time with the mores and language and lack of civility of today’s culture.

Yet she would adapt, because that would be the practical thing to do. And she would be elegant, gracious . . . and, to me, cute.

Dianne Russell Kidder is a writer, consultant and social worker, who is based in Lisbon. She is a regular contributor to this column. She can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].