My mom called a few days ago to tell me that my granmama is not doing well, that she is suffering from pneumonia and other complications. She is ninety five years old. Almost a century of ‘spit and vinegar’ as my aunts have said. Three time zones away in Virginia she is far away from me now, but the memories of her have come flooding back in the last twenty four hours as I have reflected both on her impact on my life and the person that she is. Granmama, also known as Granny Tommie, Tommie, and Esther, is one of the last of her generation, a generation that fell in love during WWII, that raised children in the 1950s, that lived in America at a time when America had not yet succumbed to the monoculture that now typifies our homogenous highways and suburbs.
At sixteen I spent two weeks traveling with Granmama from the dogwood lined streets of Virginia, across the West Virginia mountains, through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and up to Granmama’s childhood home in North Dakota. It was a trip I will never forget for it was a journey not only across states, and across cultural divides, but back into time and into the person that I only knew as my ‘Granmama.’
Granmama left North Dakota during WWII to become an X-Ray technician for the Navy (after traveling to Montana and even Washington). What possessed her to take this course that would forever change her life? Was it adventure, restlessness, or a sense of duty that motivated a beautiful, stubborn, independent Midwestern Lutheran to leave North Dakota? In the Navy she met William Rush Whitman, a son of Virginia aristocracy of sorts. In three months of courtship and one ‘Dear John’ letter home to a fiance, Tommie married my Grandaddy, a genteel Virginia surgeon whose family line included chaplains at Virginia universities, founders of Yale, and even some of the founders of the New England colonies. The mysteries of time and place are many- where we are born, where we move, and the relationships that are forged in those moves that forever change the course of our lives. A North Dakota beauty becomes a Southern doctor’s wife in 1940s Virginia and a new generation is born. With an elegance and gracefulness that seem so distant in our time, Tommie raised six children- five equally stubborn daughters and a son. Pouring her favorite cocktail of bourbon and water, she toasts life with a contagious zeal. She is stubborn like bourbon and smooth like water, a woman both of her time and yet slightly outside of her time.
Our journey together to North Dakota was a journey into womanhood for me. For the first time the comfortable boat of my sheltered, pampered Atlanta upbringing was rocked as I drove across the country in another boat- Granmama’s big white Cadillac. With each exit we logged our miles and meals in a tidy spiral notebook. I touched the cornerstone of a Lutheran church in Iowa which her uncle built. I drove across the same plains that she crossed when she left her home for the East Coast, innocent of the turn of events which laid before her. I sat by her, listening to stories of friends, family, and growing up in Minot, North Dakota, while she drank three pots of coffee with her cousin. My eyes were opened. Who was this woman sitting beside me? Much more than my grandmother. She is a sister, a daughter, a lover, a friend, a dreamer, a woman who loves her family, loves beauty, and loves me. In many ways the beginnings of my grandparents’ lives betray the ones they desired- Granmama, a stylish, social people lover born in Canada and raised on the plains of North Dakota and Grandaddy, born to a doctor to become a doctor while inside longing for quiet, for the lake, and for the farms of VIrginia. Perhaps they saw in one another a piece of who, deep down, they were themselves and in that union found a wholeness. Grandaddy, we miss you. Granmama, we love you. Thank you for the stories of which you are a part and the ones that you began.
This is so sweet! I cried. Love the photos and the stories of your trip to ND.
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