“Happy 126th Birthday to my Grandmother!”
A blogpost by Lisa Williams Kline
My grandmother would have been 126 years old this March. I adored her. We used to visit her in Richmond, Virginia, at her row house on Mulberry Street. I loved the stairs in her house. I loved the antique china Christmas decorations she displayed every year. I loved the lace doilies on the arms of her easy chairs, the way she made “fizzes” with ice cream and ginger ale, and the way she treated any scrapes or boo-boo’s with vinegar and soda. I loved to feed the ducks at Byrd Park, not far from her house.
After she died, my mother gave me all her letters and photographs. She had saved boxes and boxes of them, all the way back to when she was a teen. I couldn’t look at them at first, but after a few months I started going through them, and was fascinated. One of the oldest letters was from 1909, when a boy wrote her a note asking if he could walk her to church that Wednesday. She grew up in a tiny town called Atlantic on the coast of North Carolina. There were no roads there at first; the only way to get there was by boat. Her father was a fisherman, and she was the youngest of many children. Her mother died in childbirth when she was two. As a teen, she left home to live with a cousin in New Bern, where she went to school and got a job at a car dealership. Because she worked at the dealership, she learned to drive, and was one of the first women in New Bern to do so. She also lived through the 1918 flu epidemic in her 20’s, which makes more of an impression on me now than it did before, since we’ve been living through Covid. Eventually she moved to Richmond, Virginia and married my grandfather, who was a widower with a pre-teen daughter. My mom was their only child together, and he died when Mom was seven. After that, my grandmother supported herself and my mother by turning her home into a boarding house and also making costumes at a Richmond theater. As a single mother, she managed to hang onto her house through the depression as well as send her daughter to college after World War II.
I wrote my first novel, Eleanor Hill, about her. It’s a fictionalized story, based on her letters and photos, about her young adulthood in Atlantic and New Bern around 1910. While she lived a fairly ordinary, sometimes lonely life, I felt that she was an independent woman for her time, and that hers was a life worth remembering and memorializing. Eleanor Hill won the North Carolina Juvenile Literature Award when it came out.
When Eleanor Hill went out of print, a dear friend who has a small publishing company offered to reprint it. I was so honored and touched. My multi-talented daughter designed the beautiful cover. So Eleanor Hill is still in print and available on amazon for those who may be interested. Happy Birthday, Mommis!