My therapist and I were talking about if I had examples in my life of women who have been widowed – that it may be helpful for me to see that others have made it through. I do know a couple of people around my age – but the person I thought of first was my great-grandmother, Clara Everett – or as all of us great-grandkids called her, Grandma Everett.
In my earliest memories of Grandma Everett, she was living in a little white house with her youngest daughter, Charlene. Grandma Everett wore pastel floral house dresses and always had her gray hair in a bun. There were doilies on all the end tables and the coffee table; and in her bedroom, irons in various sizes – not electric irons but the kind you heat in a fire.
My mom would take my brother Trevor and me there once a week to visit.
“How are you?” I would ask Grandma Everett when we arrived.
I knew this was the polite thing to ask, especially to someone as old as Grandma Everett.
I also knew that most people would say, “oh, I’m fine,” and continue to other subjects.
Grandma Everett would reply with complaints. She wasn’t feeling well, or she was having trouble with the washing machine, or she had dandelions in her yard, or the mail delivery had been late.
Charlene would roll into the room in her wheelchair, legs atrophied from polio. She wore bright colors and festive costume jewelry, and she was always cheerful and delighted to see us.
Charlene was the youngest of the 9 children – 8 girls and 1 boy. She was born on February 4, 1928 in central Kansas, completing the Everett family just in time for the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and a polio outbreak in 1930.
Photo: Back row, left to right: Rita, Ruth, Grace, John, Ione, Thelma; Front row, left to right: June, Donna, Grandma Everett, Charlene
Charlene was the first in the family to get polio. My grandma June was the second, which probably saved her. By the time the family realized what was wrong with Charlene, her legs and feet were paralyzed. But when my grandma June started having similar symptoms, her brother John massaged her legs and feet constantly to keep them from atrophying.
Her feet were still affected - I remember they were arched, as if they were trying to curl up on themselves, and she had trouble finding comfortable shoes, aside from the orthotic ones she often wore.
There is a picture of her on her wedding day where she is wearing the prettiest little heels and when I see it, I always think about how much her feet must have hurt.
But she could walk, something Charlene never did again.
Photo: Grandma June and Grandpa Calvin on their wedding day
The family didn’t have much money, even before the Depression started. Their father worked at a printing press while Clara took care of the nine children. They lived next to the railroad tracks. The younger girls never had new clothes of their own, only hand-me-downs – sometimes so used that they literally fell apart at school, as happened when the elastic broke in one girl’s pants just as she stood up.
The heavily-worn clothes were mended until they couldn’t be mended any more, and were washed every night, hung out to dry, and ironed before school.
Maybe Grandma Everett kept all those old irons around to remind her of how far she’d come.
Polio, the Depression and the Dust Bowl were just precursors to the main event in their family. In 1933, Melvin died, leaving Clara a widow, the children ranging in age from five to twenty-two. I think the oldest two girls were out of the house by then, and sending whatever money they could spare to help.
I rarely wanted to visit Grandma Everett. I always thought of her as a cranky, stubborn old woman. Yet I have a photo – Trevor, me and two of our cousins - with Grandma Everett, posing on a mustard yellow couch that I remember being in my great aunt Grace’s living room. Grandma Everett is surrounded by four of her towheaded young great-grandchildren and she is beaming.
Why don’t I remember that Grandma Everett?
Instead I remember the cranky Grandma Everett and the one that my great-aunts – her daughters – told me about.
They told me that after their dad died and the girls were fighting amongst themselves, Grandma Everett would tell them that she was going to take Charlene and go sit on the railroad tracks and wait for the train to hit them.
The younger girls could cry and beg her not to go; the older girls would lock them in the bathroom and refuse to let them save her, already on to this manipulative tactic.
I assume John just stayed out of it.
Once I asked my dad if he thought Grandma Everett really would have let a train hit her.
“I’m pretty sure she knew the train schedule and was working around it,” he said.
Grandma Everett may not have had the best parenting skills with her threats of being hit by a train – but she was strong and resilient, and I’m sure she was doing the best she could to raise 9 children on her own during the Great Depression. She was probably the strongest and most resilient woman I’ve known. That’s an example I can follow.