Irene Eldora Cartwright Williams
I've been working on this blog for nearly a year now, with only a couple more stories to be explored. I'm altering this week's prompt just a little because somehow I've never written about my Grandma Williams and that's just not right. Of my two grandmas, I was closest to her and spent the most time with her, even sharing a bedroom for a year with her when I was in middle school. Between 1952 when I was born until 1955 when my parents bought their first house, we lived in an apartment sectioned off from Grandma and Grandpa's house at 456 E. Walnut Street in Nappanee. As soon as I could crawl, I roamed back and forth through the door that separated our apartment from Grandma and Grandpa's part of the house. I was the apple of Grandma's eye since I was her first grandchild and was considered the most perfect baby ever born. It was an idyllic start for my life.
Irene was born on 26 Oct 1909 in the tiny village of Mylo, North Dakota only a few miles from the Canadian border, just twenty years after North and South Dakota were simultaneously admitted to the Union. Her family had emigrated from Indiana eleven years earlier to homestead 160 acres of land. Although Grandma could claim North Dakota as her birthplace, she had no memory of the place since her family moved back to Indiana before she was a year old. As far as my mom can remember, Grandma never visited her home state later in life. However, Mylo is on my bucket list.
When Grandma was 14 years old and finishing her freshman year in high school her father died. That was the last year she attended school. I know her mother cleaned houses to make a living for the family after losing her husband, but I don't know if Grandma herself went to work as well to help out. At 16 ½ Grandma married Lester Williams.
The Cartwright family when Grandma's older brother Pete was serving in WW1. Grandma is wearing the hair bow.
I think this may have been taken about 1924 when her father died.
I love this picture taken early in her marriage.
Grandma had curly dark auburn-red hair and about a million freckles, although they don't show up in any of the above pictures. Her feet were small (in comparison to mine, anyway). When she was a girl the top joint of one of her index fingers was cut off when she and her older sister Clara were putting away a hand-push reel mower. A tiny piece of fingernail grew out like a little claw for most of her life until she had that removed as an adult. Grandma's arms were big and squishy soft. I can remember coming inside after playing outside in the snow and putting my hands under her soft upper arms to warm them up as she held me.
I could always count on something delicious to eat at her house. One of her specialties was berry pie and she never seemed to care that I just ate the filling since I didn't like piecrust. When she bought maple syrup from her Amish neighbors, Grandma would pour some in a saucer and give me bread to tear into pieces and dip in the syrup. There was always a gallon of vanilla ice cream from the Burger Dairy Store in Nappanee in her freezer and plenty of Hershey's syrup to cover it.
Grandma was famous for the volume of her snoring. Looking back now, I'm not sure how I ever fell asleep when we shared a bedroom. She had moved in with our family after she and my grandpa divorced in the mid-1960s. Luckily I slept a lot easier than I do now because even foam earplugs wouldn't have helped that level of racket.
After Grandma moved from our house and back to Nappanee we still saw her a lot. More than once when she came to visit us before I had a driver's license she'd take me back home with her and let me drive her Ford on the 30 miles of country roads. And once, for some reason, when I was a freshman or sophomore I decided it would be fun to ride my bike to her house to spend the night. I recruited my friend Crystal and begrudgingly let my little sister Janet come along. We didn't take any water with us; instead we stopped at one or two farm houses along the way to ask for drinks. We were pretty trusting back then. After spending the night in a tent in Grandma's front yard we got on our bikes again and headed back home with sore seats.
Grandma was proud when I graduated from high school and college and she traveled all the way to Arizona for my wedding in 1973. Four years later I made her a great-grandma for the first time when my twins were born. Two days after I gave birth she wrote us this letter:
Her eyesight was starting to fail by this time but it didn't stop her a few weeks later from flying to Arizona to meet her great-granddaughters Erin Eileen and Nicole Irene. Grandma was thrilled to know that I had chosen Irene as Niki's middle name. Mom and I took the opportunity to have portraits taken and I'm so glad we did. By early December of that year, Grandma passed away from heart disease so I never saw her again.
One last favorite picture:
and a recipe in her writing:
If Grandma could come back now as a 113 year-old she'd find that she had 21 great-grandchildren and 21 great-great-grandchildren. She'd be over-the-moon happy to meet them.
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