Grandma Henke

Sixty-one years ago today mother gave birth … to me.    Dad said I looked like a scrawny little yellow bird but that he loved me anyway.   They also said I cried for the first six months of my life.  

That year the winter storms had been fierce and the little town where they lived, Draper, Utah, was completely snowed in.    The winds had made huge drifts of snow across the roads and when mother went into labor there was no way they could drive the car out of Draper to State Street where the roads were a little bit better and Mom could be taken to the hospital.    I was told that a friend of Dad’s, Ralph Smith, came over on his tractor and pulled a sled holding Mom and Dad through the storm and blowing snow out to where another friend of theirs met them in a car so they could slowly make their way to the old Cottonwood Maternity Hospital in Murray.    I can’t imagine mother saw it all as an exciting adventure … even though it does make an exciting story for me to re-tell years later.

At that time women were kept at the hospital in their beds for ten days after delivering their babies.    By the time they were released from the hospital they were so weak from staying down it took them a lot longer to regain their strength.

I feel close to Mom and Dad today.   I’m grateful for parents who gave me a life filled with love and trust.    Ours was a happy home full of laughter and fun … and a lot of chores and hard work.    It was a good time to be born.      I wish my grandchildren could have some of the luxuries I had as a child; the luxuries being fields and mountains to play in, farm animals, fences and trees to climb, irrigation ditches to swim in, huge gardens to weed that were full of delicious vegetables, fruit trees, and lots of creative imaginative play time with friends and cousins.     It was a safe time … no one locked their houses or cars and most people left their keys in the car so they wouldn’t lose them.    We walked freely to friends homes and rode our bicycles the two miles to the post office and drug store without parental supervision.     Everyone knew everyone in Draper so there was always a parent watching the children somewhere along the way.

On Saturday mornings I’d sit quietly and listen to stories on the radio before we got our first television set when I was about eight years old.   It was a small one with a very fuzzy black and white picture.     We even had to do all our math without calculators to give us a quick answer!    We made our own fun.   There were no electronic games or computers so we played board and card games at the round, oak table in the kitchen … like Pit!   “Two two two … four four four … three three three,” we’d shout trying to push our cards face down into a trade with each other.    

We spent a lot of hours standing around the piano singing four part harmony while mother accompanied us and sang tenor.     I spent a lot of time practicing the piano while mother baked bread in the kitchen and corrected my counting and wrong notes.    

I dressed kittens and puppies in doll clothes and pushed them around in a buggy … and they cooperated!   Dad built me a little playhouse outside with a sand pile attached.   My friends and I had hours and hours of fun there.    

Today I’m hoping Mom and Dad are looking down on me and know how grateful I am; how much I appreciate their hard work and sacrifice; how much I love and miss them.    I’ve had the good life.