Today, like many Americans, my thoughts and prayers are with Madelyn Lee Payne Dunham and her family which includes the Obamas. I hope that she enjoys a full and complete recovery, because, like Senator Obama, I know the wonderful lessons we learn from our grandmothers particularly during challenging times in our lives
My maternal grandmother, Edna Norman Downs was born on her family's farm in Belwood, North Carolina about 64 miles northwest of where I live now. She was one of 14 children, though only 11 survived infancy. As a young bride she and her husband left the hardships of the rural south for the promises of the industrial north during the "roaring twenties". Her family didn't have money. Her only dowry was a lone fig sproutling dug from beneath a huge mother tree in her parent's orchard. She planted it right next to the kitchen door of their house in Baltimore Maryland.
As a little girl I loved to visit my Grandma, played under that fig tree, and at the end of summer would enjoy eating its fresh, sweet fruits. In winter when the weather threatened a hard freeze, my Grandma would be out there covering that tree with some of her best handmade quilts.
My grandmother would tell you how that fig tree helped save her family. You see my grandfather lost his job at Bethlehem Steel after the crash of 1929. He was one of the men in the pictures standing in those long lines at unemployment agencies. When he did manage to earn a nickel or two for a day's work, he'd drown his sorrows at the bottom of a cheap bottle of wine. My grandmother was a proud woman and resourceful. That fall she traded figs for some laying hens and in the spring traded eggs for seeds to plant a vegetable garden in the vacant lot behind her house. What she didn't feed to her children, she traded for things they needed or sold for cash to pay the rent.
Growing up, grandma told me lots of stories about life with no electricity, gasoline, television or even radio. About a time when children walked miles to school after already working for hours on the farm. A time when people read books, made their own toys, and played Parcheesi and Chinese Checkers for fun. In all her life she never earned more than $5000 in a single year, never owned a car, wouldn't have an air-conditioner or a dishwasher, never used a computer, a cell phone, or an iPod. My grandmother put up peaches, pickles and tomatoes every year in mayonnaise jars. She crocheted rugs out of empty plastic bread bags. I remember her saying. "Peri Lyn, you've got to use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without."
No matter how bad things got, Grandma never complained. She'd say "Life ain't about how fast you run or how high you climb, but how well you bounce." My grandmother bounced through the Spanish flu, two world wars, and the great depression. In her last years, when arthritis gripped her joints. She would say the aches and pains were just God's way of reminding her she was still living. She didn't complain about the cataracts and glaucoma that took her sight. She said it was God's way of telling her she had seen all she needed to see. The last thing I remember her telling me was about hearing a singer on a radio telling folk the only face lift anyone ever needs is the one they give themselves every time they smile.
Tonight as you watch the news, listen to the forecasts of economic gloom for the forseeable future, and hear pontifications over whether Al Qaeda is planning our demise, don't despair. Instead, just roll up your sleeves and get ready. No matter what comes, we will survive, because some of us have the good judgement not to forget the wisdom of our grandmothers.