the Grandmother

My Grandmother was always looking up. Sometimes she was looking up to see if she could see my dad's plane flying over to land at the airport just north of her house. Always, she was looking up for Divine guidance.
She was a remarkable woman.
She loved to draw and write.
I imagine that many of her interests were met with the consternation of her serious, farmer parents.
She told me that she got into trouble, more than once, when she was supposed to be about some chore on the farm only to be caught chasing butterflies or on some other flight of fancy.
She was interested in fancying up the house and liked doilies  and vases full of flowers. "Mama wanted to do just what had to be done in the house so that she could get outside." Grandma told me.
Their dispositions flared sometimes based on the disparity of their interests.
My Grandma almost died of typhoid fever when she was 16. My best recollection of  this story is that
the illness was virtually epidemic in the small Arkansas town where she grew up. It struck at harvest time. Her family helped gather crops for neighbors too ill to do it for themselves. By the time the fever took hold of Grandma and her folks, there was no one left to help.
Many country folk lost their homesteads when crops rotted in the field. In those days before banking laws to offer protection, there was little that could be done to keep the wolf from the door.
Grandma survived the fever against the doctor's prediction but the family homestead was foreclosed on by the bank. They strived to get back on their feet even as Grandma did. She had to relearn to walk. Her parents share cropped until they were able to pay cash for a farm no one could take from them.
She married in her early twenties. Her husband, who she loved fiercely, died of a heat stroke while working in a copper smelter just a few years into their marriage. "I knew he was gone when I saw them carrying him up the walk," she told me. His body was prepared for burial on her kitchen table.
Recalling the event, years later, she said "I could have crawled in the grave with him."
She survived because of the nearness of "the Savior," she said. "He came to me and comforted me and I was able to go on."
She became a nurse. It was working with a cancer patient that she met her second husband, my Grandpa. The patient was his mother. And though, Great Grandma McKenzie died, the love that grew between her son and her nurse flourished.
They moved from Arkansas to Oklahoma during the oil boom. They hoped for children, though for many years there were none. Then, when they'd "about given up hope" they had a child. Though not easily.
Scar tissue believed to have been produced during her bout with typhoid fever created such lesions that a normal delivery was impossible. Grandma ultimately underwent a Cesarean section, something
the country doctor who attended her attempted only because there seemed no other choice.
"He'd not done one before but he had seen them done in the war," she explained to in response to my questions about Daddy's birth.
Mother and son survived, but it would be 3 months before she was strong enough to hold him in her arms. On Daddy's birthday every year, Grandpa would say "me and Johnny's Grandma Katie sure had a hard time the day your Dad was born." Even many years later, Grandma found little humor in his statement.
There would be other hard times. My parent's divorce. Her loss of both Grandpa and Daddy in less than two years.
She kept looking up.
Someone asked if she minded living alone.
"Oh, I don't," came her reply. "Christ lives here with me. He is with me everyday. He always has been."
Which explains why she was always looking up. It was from that direction she drew strength and the ability to survive and thrive despite the stuff like threw at her.