My Gramma Roberts and me, in front of my parents’ fireplace. She’s 90 years old (nearly 90 and a half!) and still living by herself in her own house. We had such a great weekend. My husband thought I wasn’t paying enough attention to her last time we saw her, so I tried to take care to sit with her outside, because she loves the outside, and my parents have a beautiful garden behind their house. It was very peaceful, and a lovely opportunity to be with her.
My father sat with us for a while, and told me a story that I’d never heard before – that he’d raised a pig for 4H when he was in school! He was vague about how old he actually had been – it was in Marion, he said, so sometime between 1st and 6th grade. He raised the pig to be 400 lbs, and then Grand, my grandfather, arranged for a butcher to kill it, and dress it, and then store all the meat. And he remembers that periodically they’d stop by the butcher’s to pick up a couple of packages of pork.
My grandmother didn’t remember much about it, but they talked a bit about Marion. My grandfather was the principal of the school out there, and supervised adding on grades until the school went through 12th grade. When he died, there were people at his funeral who told my father and grandmother that they would never have been able to go on through high school unless that school went that far – otherwise, Dad said, they’d have had to go to County, which was 20, 25 miles away. And back in those days, I suppose, it might as well have been like saying, I think I’ll fly to Paris every day for school. Or even for lunch. There’s a legacy for you, untold hundreds of children who were schooled far beyond what they had thought they could be.
