A Drawer Full of Memories
Burnt toast, the smell of Folgers coffee in the afternoon, African Violets in the kitchen window, the San Angelo newspaper folded open to the crossword puzzle page on quiet evenings, carefully tended roses growing in front of a red brick house, sweet rolls baking in the oven, a drawer full of photographs saved from what seemed to be the beginning of time, a gentle rub on the shoulder expressing love far more eloquently than words could ever capture... these are the things that define her to me. She's been dead for almost a decade, but tears still stream down my face when I let myself remember that she's gone. Her name was Salina. She was my grandmother.
She wasn't one to talk about herself much. She had that sort of humility that great people seem to have, and I'd bet that she had no idea how great she was. Her reticence left me hungry for more; I never got my fill of her stories or assorted bits of wisdom.
She came to West Texas with her family by train when she was a girl. She told me that when she was on that train, she imagined West Texas to be the frontier, untamed and unexplored, the wild west of the era's folklore. She said that she dreamed of racing that train on a horse. Her eyes lit up at this imagined freedom, and I could see the rambunctious girl she used to be, at least in her dreams.
Perhaps because of her modesty and practical nature, my favorite photo of her is a picture of her with some of her sisters and cousins, still girls, taken in 1925. They are sitting with their dresses pulled up, exposing their knees. Her voice filled with adolescent glee as explained the risqué significance of the photo to me.
Most of her other photographs show how she was in the world. Picture after picture show her holding her children up to the camera. Some are in front of small wooden houses; a few are in front of the family car. But all share the barren West Texas landscape as the background. Life in West Texas in the 1930's, in the midst of the Great Depression, before most families could afford modern conveniences like washing machines or gas stoves, was a struggle. And she seemed to compensate for the harshness of life by taking care of everyone but herself.
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