The Greats: A Collage of Family Stories

My great grandma talks. A lot. I suppose she had to make up for my great grandpa’s quiet nature in their 67 years of marriage before he passed. Now 88 years old—with my great grandpa 2 years and 9 months deceased—, my great grandma talks just as much as she used to and repeats herself more than ever. The stories she repeats are endless.

“That time I jumped over the farm fence. I was barefoot, and I came down hard on a rusty nail,” she’d begin. Or, “When I went down to the cellar to get Mom a jar of preserves, a snake nearly scared me half to death. I ran back up the stairs so fast I didn’t even grab the jar.”

We all nod in response, somehow still interested in the retellings of her stories. Maybe it’s her voice that compels us. Sometimes she’ll tell us the same stories more than once in a single night. Once during supper, and another while gathered around the table together, playing cards.

“Dad was a great whistler. Everywhere he went you knew he was there ‘cuz of his whistling. He used to call me Yona. He never could pronounce his L’s. And my brothers called me Loni.”

I always found it funny that a father would name his child something he couldn’t pronounce. Leona. I like the name, and I never ask her about it, I simply smile at the thought.

And, “He always wanted to go back to Holland to visit his three sisters that didn’t come to America. Verge—my older brother—offered to go with him once, but he said no. He was afraid he couldn’t speak the language anymore.” It’s really quite an interesting ancestry. He and some of his siblings came in at Ellis Island at the beginning of the 20^th century. Then he raised his three children on a farm in Nebraska. “And then every Christmas, Dad would play Santa for the children in town. We all knew it was him.”

My great grandma’s story is quite beautiful in and of itself. She married my great grandpa at 19. Apparently they’re distant cousins. He was gone in the war (World War II) for two years before they settled down in Southern California—where my family’s remained since. My great grandma wrote him letters during the war. She’d sometimes write them backwards so it would take him longer to read. “What in the world has come to pass that you can’t read this without a glass?” she’d write on paper backwards to me to demonstrate. I’d stand on the couch looking at the paper in the mirror to decipher it, and then begin constructing my own messages.

I even became the star of some stories. “Do you remember that time we took you camping and everyone was sitting around outside talking? You came out of the motor home and told us you were going on vacation. You went back inside the motor home and locked us all out.” And one of my favorites, “You’d be singing at the top of your voice,” referring to our strolls in their mobile home park. And of course, “You girls’ room.” I’m tickled at the thought of my special place in their house. Oh, and how my great grandpa would tickle me when I sat on his lap in his blue reclining chair.

My great grandparents—they called themselves The Greats—babysat me when I was little, from about one to five. And after that, my younger sister and I visited often. We had our own room in their house, “the girls’ room.” These stories are my favorite. The memories play out like movie scenes in my mind.

Now my sister and I tell and retell stories.

“Do you remember when we used to get out of bed in the middle of the night and army crawl to the kitchen to “steal” cookies from the cookie jar?”

My great grandma just smiles and nods.