By Davalynn Spencer @davalynnspencer

I wish I had known my grandmother when she was a young woman with long russet hair and ankle-brushing skirts. I wish I could have seen her dreams, her daily struggles, and heard the defiance in her voice when she said, “I will not marry until I am eighteen.”

An old maid, others warned. She’d be an old maid by then.

I wish I could have seen her in San Francisco the night her father didn’t come home. What sense of loss must she have felt—she, her sister, and their mother. Papa had been carrying the payroll, someone told them, and he’d been shanghaied.

Such a fate caught many men unaware in those lusty years. Fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons awoke kidnapped and beaten, drugged, or drunk on the decks of great sailing ships bound for ports unknown.

Forced labor ended their lives if they didn’t manage to escape like the characters of a Louis L’Amour title, Cross Fire Trail.  Perhaps my great-grandfather’s fate is why I’m so fond of the movie of that same name. No one knew what happened to him.

I wish I had known my grandmother’s reasons for marrying Benjamin Ferris Chamberlain. Did she love the red-headed carpenter? Did she fear for him as he fought in the fiery aftermath of the Great San Francisco earthquake of 1906?

Did she believe they would find a new life together when they left for the San Joaquin Valley? Did hope purchase their farmland and raise a three-walled cabin with only a blanket to serve as the fourth?

Did she envy her sister who stayed in San Francisco and married a wealthy lawyer but had no children? And did she boast of her own little ones when old friends stopped by her new farmhouse—unmarried sisters who had survived the Titanic.

Arriving decades behind her other grandchildren, I knew her only as a little woman stooped by hard work who wore her long gray hair in a bun and her wide wedding band on a chain around her neck. It had worn through over the years, so she flattened it, punched a hole in one end, and hung it on a delicate chain. “I’ll be buried with it,” she told me.

I know she believed she was visited one night by the spirit of a little girl she had cared for. “Look, I washed my hands,” the child said, as if proud to have been obedient even on her way to heaven.

And I know my grandmother believed that she herself would die in the fall, when the leaves let go their grasp.

When they fell six weeks after Benjamin breathed his last, she indeed let go and flew away with them as they danced from the trees.

Each fall I think of my grandmother and her sugar-dusted apple fritters and how she simply knew certain things.

And I wonder if, like her, I will dance on an autumn breeze someday with leaves awhirl as I catch my ride to heaven.

~

“How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.” -John Burroughs

~

The LORD shall preserve your going out and your coming in
From this time forth, and even forevermore.
Psalm 121:8

~

Dusty images stirred in Grace’s memory—a snowy graveside service for her grandfather years before. Grandmother’s mention of a boarding house, though at the time Grace didn’t know what that meant.

The widow paused a moment before addressing her again, an added depth of tone in her voice. “I see your grandmother’s fearlessness in you. The only thing different is your hair. You have more than your share, as did she. but hers was fiery red to match her spirit.”

Grace’s eyes welled, spilling first across her soul with the healing of home she’d not found when she returned to the ranch three weeks ago. Her brothers and their wives had welcomed her. So had Helen and the boys. But she didn’t fit there. Just like she hadn’t fit before she left with the Wild West Show.

But here? In her grandmother’s home with a woman who had known her so well? ~Covering Grace

Inspirational Western Romance – where the hero is heroic.

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(c) 2024 Davalynn Spencer, all rights reserved.

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