On Friday, my mother, stepfather, and myself made the roughly 17-hour trip to visit my grandmother and grandfather in southern Missouri. We try to make this trip at least once a year. For me, the drive usually isn’t too bad. I sit in the backseat reading, watching YouTube videos, and sleeping for most of it. Cleverly, I pulled an all-nighter on Thursday with some old friends that I don’t get to see nearly often enough. This made the 9 hours I spent passed out in the car that much better. I gorged on cheese doodles, coke and Hershey kisses (perfect road trip food in my book). Finally, at around 9:30 local time, we pulled up to the house my grandparents have lived in for the last 50 years. This place, while small, is a perfect example of southern modest living and I always look forward to walking in the door and getting that first whiff of a farmer’s smell.
Sunset over Tennessee
For the first time in my life I saw my grandpa as a frail old man, confined to a chair in the living room with a shattered shoulder, which he fell on and broke in March. In the last 2 years, he has been dealing with cancer, worsening diabetes, pneumonia, and now the complete lack of my mobility on the left side of his upper body. I haven’t seen him since all of this started, as our trips up here have been less frequent and only my mother has been coming when a trip is planned. My grandfather barely has a high school education, but has always help run the house and helped to take care of my grandmother, who has had a number of severe health problems, including several strokes, over the last 10 years. My grandpa has been a hardworking farmer, father, and cotton gin employee of some kind for his entire life. He is the only one of the three people in the household with a driver’s license, and frankly he is getting a little too old to still be driving. My aunt, who has lived with them her entire life, because of her epilepsy, has never been able to hold any sort of real job, get a drivers license, or really consider living on her own. We have been extremely fortunate that she has been here to help with everything and play nurse to both of them all these years. I also have another aunt with severe epilepsy and a mental handicap that lives in the main town 15 minutes away with her husband, a man with a number of mental handicaps himself.
Visiting my mother’s family has always been a rather humbling experience. To see the hardships they go through on a daily basis, paying hundreds of dollars in medical bills, doctor visits and medication, per person alone is enough to make me extremely aware of how fortunate I am to live as well as I do and to be as healthy as I am. I have never had any major health problems, besides getting a little crazy when I have a looming deadline, and I need to remember to be grateful for not inheriting one of the many things that plagues that side of my family. My grandmother has had a difficult time speaking and walking since she suffered several strokes a few years ago. Last night she spoke clearly and was even making jokes and laughing at the quirky things my grandpa does. She got up at one point to walk to the restroom, which used to require both a wheelchair and my aunt, but today she moved with her walker at a pretty brisk pace down the hall. It was such an amazing thing to see. My mother and I immediately commented on it, letting her know just how proud we were to see her independently mobile again. I can imagine she is too.
When my mother and I were originally planning this trip, we were going to becoming up later this week and next weekend. When she told me that she wanted to go this weekend instead, I definitely hesitated on confirming that I would be coming. This week is one of my best friend’s graduation from college (and the subsequent after-party), Cinco de Mayo, one of the last 2 weekends another close friend of mine is going to be in town before heading to China for a summer internship (overachiever), and also an opportunity to spend time with my high school best friend who I get to see only a couple times a year. And rarely do I have the opportunity to be this social all in one weekend.
Obviously, I made the decision to come. And thinking back, I feel pretty silly for hesitating. Seeing my grandparents is something I get to do maybe once a year. And with both of their health declining, I need to make sure I take every opportunity to see them while I still can. They definitely still have that old southern way of thinking (They both still refer to African Americans as “coloreds” and the even worse “N” word without even the slightest afterthought). And despite all three of them being on welfare and government healthcare, my grandmother made a comment about how there are too many “coloreds using welfare.” I have never heard her say anything like that before, my grandpa is usually the one with no filter, and it definitely caught me off guard. I proceeded to make the case that that isn’t true and why so many people are on welfare. Which she happily listened to and even seemed to accept to be true. Despite some things that I consider to be major character flaws in my own generation, I adore them and their sweet and innocent (enough) natures.
My grandparents watching their first YouTube video. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wt824D1Bqg)
Saturday morning we were talking about refrigerators over breakfast, mainly that growing up neither of grandparents had one, and we got to talking about family members that I had never heard of. These were not distant cousins three times removed or anything, I guess I have just never truly taken an interest in knowing the names of people I hadn’t met, which frankly is just ridiculous. I have actually become extremely interested in my heritage, genetic traits that family members share, and whatnot over the last year. Not sure why, but I really enjoy comparing the faces of people to other members of their family. I know that I have my mother’s nose and eyes, which is also my grandpa’s nose and grandmother’s eyes. And my father’s smile, dimple, and athletic legs (I usually compare myself to a horse). My brother and I look a lot more a like then I had previously noticed, which I only saw after I stopped shallowly looking at the two of us and really started comparing features.
My mother and Myself.
Anyway, this whole discussion of family reminded of a project I have attempted to start a hundred times, a family tree that goes back as far as records and memories will allow. Up until now, I have known almost nothing about my family. I know that my grandfather’s last name is Atwell, an assumingly English last name. And that’s it. My mother has never cared to know where her family came from originally, we are completely European, but with just a few last names, we could know what our country of origin is.
Well, I am definitely English. I spent hours compiling information the last 2 days from my grandparents’ memories and then from a very handy family record that my great grandmother had the good sense to write down. My grandfather’s family history isn’t nearly as detailed as my grandmother, but I managed to make 4 family trees that all end with my immediate family, aunts, uncles and cousins. Multiple last names came into the picture. The original Atwell and Stephens, then Barrett, Graham, Smith, and Whitener. I have 3 sets of twins in my family tree, 2 sets of them in the same immediate family. I have what my grandmother referred to as “double cousins”, which is where 2 members of one family married 2 members from another family. Everyone has an awesome name like Grace Arizona, Jefferson Calvin, and Missouri Jane. And all of families prior to my mother’s generation have at least 5 kids and some have 10 or 11.
My grandmother’s mother’s family tree
Needless to say it took while to input all of them. And then came the photos. My uncle had been kind enough to scan in a lot of old photos going back to my grandmother’s grandparents. So I have pictures to put with the some of the few hundred names I have. That is a part of the project I haven’t really started on. I uploaded them to my computer and started identifying the people in each one. But actually getting them onto the tree will be a much larger task that I will probably work on during the 17-hour drive we are making again tomorrow.
Well, I am being called for “supper” which is actually dinner, which we had instead of lunch today. Southern eating habits are strange. Anywho, I should join them, as this is the last time I have to spend with them for probably another year.
Hope everyone out in cyberspace is having as lovely a weekend as I am.
Sunset over Matthews, MO
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