December 11: My Grandma's Birthday

December 11, 1888

Grandma’s birthday.

I was born in her little three-room house in West Texas.

So were my two sisters and three of my brothers.

Her farm was about nineteen miles from the Sweetwater hospital.

Our family had no car, so home delivery was the order of the day.

Mother’s mother’s farm was the closest thing we had to a permanent home.

For six or seven years, we moved three times a year, including a move back to Grandma’s.  All this within a twenty-five to thirty mile radius of Sweetwater, the county seat of Nolan County.

The three-pronged living pattern took us from her farm to the farm owned by Daddy’s youngest sister and her husband, Aunt Chessie and Uncle Jim.  Uncle Jim planted huge cotton acreage, and we were, in effect, migrant workers who came in each fall to harvest the crop.

When the boll-pulling season was winding down, Daddy would start his quest for a farm job.  I never learned the details of his search, but he would find a farmer who needed a hand and had a “rent house” for the farm hand to live in.

Each year, something would happen that Daddy disagreed with and wouldn’t put up with.  So he would tell the farmer what he could do with his nice farm and leave us with nowhere to live.

Grandma to the rescue.  

Robert Frost wrote, 

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, 

They have to take you in.”

Grandma may not have known Frost’s poem, “The Death o the Hired Man,” but Frost knew human nature.

I can only guess the logistics of getting us back to Grandma’s.  This was long before the cell phone era.  We had no phone.  Neither did Grandma.  So Mother probably wrote to her when she saw the end coming .  .  . Or maybe after the blowup, the boss let us stay until we heard from Grandma.

Daddy then must have hitchhiked to Aunt Chessie and Uncle Jim’s and prevailed on his brother-in-law to move us back to Grandma’s.

Then the cycle would begin anew.

Grandma was from a proud family of six sisters and a brother who trekked to Texas early in the twentieth century from their home in Mississippi, leaving one brother behind.

She apparently never approved of her only daughter’s choice of a husband.  I’m sure Mother did a lot of negotiating and praying — sometimes unsuccessful — to keep her husband and her mother from snarling at each other.  

I remember one night during one of our sojourns with Grandma: The three adults were in the kitchen with the door closed, while we five younger Webbs cringed in the big middle room.  The closed door blocked little of the yelling as mother-in-law and son-in-law hurled verbal rocks at each other. 
No doubt, these moments hastened our departure to the next location.

Despite such outbursts — which actually were few and far between — we seemed to live in relative peace as Grandma, like the farm couple in Frost’s poem, felt she had to take us in.

Two factors brought an end to our annual work in Uncle Jim’s cotton patch: First, Daddy’s two oldest boll pullers (my older sister and brother) grew up and got paying jobs on a year-round basis.  About that time, the Texas Legislature passed a law enforcing school attendance for children under sixteen.  That included me and my younger sister and brother.

Deprived of this source of autumn income, Daddy moved us to Sweetwater where he found fairly regular work with a cement contractor.  He supplemented this with occasionally assisting a man who ran a local moving company.

I haven’t mentioned the effects this impermanence had on our education.  It meant that we missed two months or more of school each fall, and we almost always were in two different schools each year.  One of the schools almost invariably was the tiny Divide School in the village about four miles from Grandma’s farm.  Our irregular attendance and shifting from school to school took a terrible toll, with my older sister and me the only two who finished high school.

We moved to town at the end of my sophomore year.  Though Mother was relieved to be freed from packing our meagre belongings for three moves a year, she was concerned about Grandma living alone all year long.  

Because I was familiar with Divide School and many classmates I had known since first grade, Mother got Daddy to agree to let me stay with Grandma for my junior and senior years.  Though I frequently hitched rides to town and back, this living arrangement provided some sense of stability for Grandma and me.  I was the high honor boy in our Class of 1951.

If Grandma had not opened her home to her daughter and family across the years, who knows what might have happened! We might not have survived as a family unit. Daddy might have drifted away, or we might have been sent to foster homes, or .  .  . 

       Forget the "What If's," and Thank God for Grandma.