A few black and white photos of my maternal grandmother, pictured here=Ethel Leah Stetson-DeWitt, make up my memory of her. The things I know, from my mother, are these. My grandmother was a writer and an excellent seamstress. She always regretted that she could not complete school, since her own mother died when she was perhaps ten years old and, since she was the oldest daughter, she stayed home to care for the other children.
The last sight she remembered, of her own mother, was seeing the winter’s steam rise from her arms as she hung the new baby’s diapers on the line.
I imagine this was more like bringing in diaper icicles than a pile of fluffy white diapers. However, her mother, my great grandmother, ended up with pneumonia and died. The two youngest babies were said to be given to neighbors to care for. In actuality, one had also died near the same time, and one was given to another family, to care for.
My grandmother wrote stories, when she wasn’t baking bread to sell and cooking meals for six children and three adults. I understand one story survives, but I have never seen it. Her daughter, my mother, writes poetry. She does not sew, her mom did it for her, but she has her mother’s love of words. She likes the way they roll off her tongue. Her earliest memory involves her toddler self, repeating a string of word/sounds to her brother and her brother saying, "Mom, she said it again."
I may have inherited a love for the written word, but what I put down is a reflection of myself. My love is for the story and, I have a desire to tell a story so the reader will be anxious to enter a world I have imagined and stay for a while.
I will get back to writing now. It can only happen by doing it, not dreaming it.
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