Grandma Eva - memories

Grandma Eva's birthday was July 3, 1903. She made her transitions in 2003, five months before her 100th birthday. She is on my mind this week and I included some little fond memories today.

Grandma Eva – memories of a special little German Irish lady
by Katherine Ari July 8, 2009


Grandma Eva was at her tallest 5’ tall. When she was 88, she had a heart attack. She lived with Grandpa Roy who was 90 in their home in Vermillion, Kansas, a town of 120 as posted on the road sign. Only about 50 of those actually lived in the town. So a medical helicopter airlifted her to the nearest hospital in Onega, KS. When she was put on the chopper, she had some new Nike’s with her. They transported her on to the hospital where they did quadruple bypass surgery on her heart. None of us had high expectations for the prognosis. She was after all 88 years old and had a gray color to her skin for many years because of the heart problems.

Grandma Eva made it through the surgery with flying colors. Her skin lost the gray color and she was out walking three miles a day after she returned home. But evidently someone in the helicopter also didn’t expect an 88-year-old woman to make it, because when she woke up, she didn’t have her new Nike’s. They weren’t with her personal things. The medic service was called and no one would own up to taking the shoes. Every time she had to return to the hospital, the doctor would ask her “Did you ever find your shoes, Eva?” “No,” she would answer. “I’m still looking for them.”

- Eva loved to garden and she loved to cook. Even when she was 92 or 93, she would insist that we come over to her house for dinner. We always tried to dissuade her by taking her out to eat, but we had to let her “feed” us at least once. The meal was always friend chicken, German scalloped potatoes or mashed potatoes, cold slaw, and a mid-west standard in Kansas as well as Oklahoma, some sort of Jell-O salad.

My mother was a great Fried Chicken maker, but though I am a pretty good cook, it isn’t one of my strong points. So Doug volunteered to help her in the kitchen. He got to the stove and started working with the chicken in the skillet. “Oh no, you don’t have the chicken fork. You can’t fry chicken without the right fork,” she quickly corrected him. She pulled out this very sharp table fork and handed it to Doug. The fork had been her Great-Grandmother’s fork and everyone had used it for frying chicken. Chicken just wouldn’t be right if you didn’t fry it with that 200 yr. old fork.

- Eva had known we were coming. Our children were her only great-grand children. On a good day, she had baked cookies – 2 different flavors and put them up in the freezer. She had oatmeal raisin and chocolate chip with black walnuts and pecans. She didn’t give them to us until we were leaving heading back home to Georgia. She said they were for the trip home. Well, let me tell you that they didn’t make it very far. She put so much love into everything she cooked. I don’t know what else she did, but those chocolate chip cookies were the best tasting chocolate chip cookies we ever tasted. They tasted like a Snicker’s bar but they were homemade cookies. It would have been nice to get the recipe, but there was something more in her batter that couldn’t be put on a card. It was a little thing. I don’t think there were more than two or three cookies for each of us, but what a dear memory – so special.

- In Kansas, the farmers are so spread out that the towns are all very small and far apart. They have a good home health care organization for elderly people to travel to the towns. The nurses and helpers take them home meals, provide nursing care, take them to the beauty shop, and take them to doctors and to the dentist. There are sometimes 3 or 4 different caretakers that come by daily. Her main caregiver was a woman about the same age as Doug and I. She told us about some of the things Eva would pull on her. One of the caregivers had come all the way out to Vermillion for an appointment for Eva. Eva left a note on the door that she had gone to the dentist. She was home. She just didn’t want to be bothered. And she pulled that on another one a day or so later. Our friend found out about it and had to get on her about it. “If you pull that stuff again, I’ll put you back in the nursing home in Centralia. Don’t you be putting notes on the door that you have gone to an appointment when you are home!”

But when Eva did have to move to the nursing home, she did the same kinds of things. “Grandma Eva, why don’t you go out in the sitting room and watch TV or visit with the other people?”
“I don’t like to be around those OLD people,” she would answer. She was 98.
“Grandma, the nurses told us you are supposed to go see the doctor today.”
“I’ve been trying to get away from him all day.” She would say as she dodged his office.

- In Kansas around that area, there are white people of German and Swedish decent. There weren’t any other nationalities around when Doug was growing up so he never heard anyone making derogatory comments. When Eva was in the nursing home, she got to watching TV soaps. Doug was quite surprised when she would start complaining about African-Americans and White mixing on the shows. She was always such a loving and sweet person; he just didn’t know she was so “opinionated” about the races mixing.

He gave me a look and then said, “You know Grandma, Kathy has Choctaw and Cherokee blood in her.”
She got this sweet little look on her face and said, “Oh, that’s nice.” And she didn’t say anything else about the races she didn’t like on TV. It was just her generation and the society she lived in.

- As I said, Grandma Eva loved to garden. She always had flowers and fruits and vegetables in her yard. They also had black walnuts trees. Grandpa Roy would sit out in the backyard picking them out for hours. He was a tall man and had a pretty hard time getting around in his 90’s. One day he had been out there shelling walnuts while sitting on a bucket. When he decided he had shelled them as long as he wanted, he tried to get up. He couldn’t get up. He called Eva to come help, but as I said earlier, Eva was a small woman. She couldn’t get him up either.

She went to the basement and got a rope and tied it around his waist and the other end to the car. She was going to pull him up by driving the car with him tied to it. Luckily, a neighbor saw what they were doing before she took off. After that Doug’s dad took the car keys and car away from both of them. – and not too soon after that, put a padlock on the door to the basement.

- Roy died when he was 96. He was in a special section of the nursing home and she was in another area. They had several times over the years gone to the home on their own, stayed a while until they felt stronger, and then checked themselves out again to return to their own home. So when Roy died, she went back home again. We were there visiting and at that time my father-in-law was living with his girlfriend in another town called Olmsberg, Kansas. It was about a 40-minute drive away.

We were there for our usual family visit and we had been invited to Dale and Betty’s house for the day. We picked Eva up and drove over. While we were there, it started raining really hard and rained that way for about 5 hours.

It is very flat in Kansas and when it rains that hard for that long, the creeks and rivers quickly overflow. Then the roads are flooded and you have to take alternate routes to get around in the spread out farm country. When it was time to go home, we couldn’t go back the way we had come that was on a small two-lane county road.

We had to go further north and take US Highway 36 from the Marysville turn back toward Seneca and then angle around to Vermillion. There is a road that they call the Axel Road that goes straight off US Hwy 36 to County Hwy 88 to Vermillion, but with the rising rivers and flooded other roads, Doug felt that the Axel road would also be flooded out. We were driving back on US Hwy 36. We would drive a little ways and Eva would say, “Now when you get to the Axel road, that is where you turn.”
Doug would answer, “I know about the Axel Rd., Grandma, but we are going on around tonight because of the flood. I expect it will be flooded out too.” She would say okay.

Three or five minutes later, she would say, “Now when you get to the Axel Road, you turn there.” Patiently Doug would answer the same way. Five minutes later, she would say it again. Doug kept his cool and patiently kept answering her the same way. She must have said it 12 times. I was in the back with the kids and we just looked at each other, rolled our eyes, and smiled. Doug just kept answering her the same way. It wasn’t an argument. She just kept saying the same thing like a broken record. He just thought it was because she was old and being forgetful or something related to her 95 years of age.

Then we got almost to the Axel road. Again she said, “The Axel Road is where you turn. They fixed the bridge a few years ago. It is high enough now that the water won’t be over the bridge.” Doug was thinking, “Yes, I know the bridge is higher but if the water is out of the banks, it may still be over the road before or after the bridge.”

But then he thought, “She just keeps insisting. Maybe she knows something I don’t know. If we go down the road and it is under water, we can just turn around. Then maybe she will listen to me.” So he said, “Okay Grandma, we’ll go on the Axel Road.”

We did. There was no problem. “Could it be that being so old and close to the other side that she had a sixth sense about those things?” We wondered. She wouldn’t stop saying it and she was right.

- Grandma was in Onega again in the hospital when she was around 98. We would drive over there every day to be with her. The drive on the country roads was 30 or 40 minutes. Grandma Eva had adult onset diabetes. Doug’s dad has diabetes. My mother and grandmother had diabetes. Doug and I woke up that morning and both of us were thinking about diabetes. We were talking about it while we were in Vermillion. When we arrived at the hospital 45 minutes later, Eva was napping as usual. Suddenly, she opened her eyes and grabbed Doug’s arm. With intensity she looked at him in the eyes and said, “That diabetes is a horrible, mean disease. You better take care of yourself and your family. You don’t want to have to deal with diabetes!” Then she relaxed and went back to sleep. “Woo – woo!” That is what we call a woo - woo; again she was close to the other side and just had a sixth sense that only a 98 year old would have.

- Eva was sweet and generous. She was patient, a good cook, and a good gardener. Every caretaker that she had ever had called her everyday at the nursing home or the hospital. She never said a cross word to anyone even when Roy was being his meanest. Yes, she made her comments about things she saw on TV or about the doctors she wanted to avoid, but at 98, she would get up daily to take care of her roommate who was 101. Doug grew up on Grandma Eva’s fried chicken and homemade pies. We all always felt her love. When she was 99, the family gave her 99 plus one to grow on long stem red roses. “We’ll give you another 100 on your 100th birthday,” a family member said.
“Oh, I don’t think I’ll be here for 100,” she said. She was right again.