Grandma Fearn

I never knew my maternal grandmother: she had died at the age of 42, with between 20 and 40 million others, in the great flu pandemic of 1918, carried to the U.S. by returning wounded American soldiers. I wish I had known her. I would have liked her. She was born Annabelle Erickson in Bergen, Norway in 1872. How and when she immigrated to America I do not know, nor do I know when and how she met my grandfather. But they did meet, and they had two children: a son, Charles, born in 1900, and a girl, Odrae, born in 1909.

From what Mom told me…and Mom was only nine years old when Grandma died…she was a warm and loving woman though like most women of her time, not effusively demonstrative of her affection. Her job, again typical of women then, was her family, and she did her job with flawless efficiency. Mom remembers the time she brought a young male classmate home from school and announced that they were going to get married. “That’s nice,” Grandma said, and then sat them down at the kitchen table for milk and cookies.

Though Mom wanted to learn to speak Norwegian, Grandma would have none of it. “You’re American,” she would say. “You will speak American.”

Hers was a world of Pastor-over-to-Sunday-dinner, of family picnics in the country, of close friends and loving relatives, of long conversations on the front porch on hot summer evenings. Hers was a world that sadly no longer exists.

Grandma had a young brother named Peter, whom my mother adored. Peter came over from Norway to live with Grandma and Grandpa. He was, at the time, 18 years old and, though he somehow managed to fool the doctors on Ellis Island, he had tuberculosis. As his health worsened, he was sent away to Arizona where, it was widely thought at the time, he could get better. But of course he couldn’t and, terribly lonely, he begged Grandma to let him come back to Rockford where within months he was dead. Dead at 18. Of tuberculosis!

Though I’m sure she never showed any favoritism between Mom and Uncle Buck, I suspect Uncle Buck was the light of her life. When America entered World War I, Uncle Buck wanted to enlist, over the strenuous objections of both Grandma and Grandpa. So he ran off and enlisted without telling them. He left home one morning and headed to the railroad station to board the train for his Army indoctrination, and somehow Grandma found out shortly after he left. She raced to the railroad station just as the train was pulling out. I had always thought that she never saw him again…not because he became a victim of the war, but because she did. But I found a photo of him, Grandpa and Grandma, and Mom in which Uncle Buck is in uniform, so…memory is not an exact science.

I have a photo of Grandma Fearn in her 1910 finest, and if you saw it, you might be able to make out the chain of a watch fob on her blouse. The original of that picture, hand tinted, hangs in an ornate gold frame over my bed, and as I type this, I can glance to my right and see the beautiful, delicate pocket watch it was attached to, in a small glass dome.

How can one condense a life into a few short paragraphs? I certainly can’t, but all I have to do is to look at that photo, or that watch, and Grandma lives, and though we never met, I know her as though she had always been in my life. Which she has.

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This blog is from Dorien's ebook of blogs, Short Circuits, available from UntreedReads.com and Amazon.com; it's also available as an audio book from Amazon/Audible.com. You can find information about Dorien's books at his web site:  www.doriengrey.com: