100 Years of life

My Grandma turns 100 years old next week - born on Sept. 24, 1907. Amazing, isn’t it?

I’m going home to PA next week to see her and to celebrate her with my family. She has continued to be spry and active in her old age. Only in the last year a walker has given aid to balance and the loss of sight in one eye has ended her years of countless hand-stitched quilts. Not bad for 99!

My Grandma began to write her life story after recovering from a heart attack in the 60’s. She stopped writing for several years “thinking I may hurt some folks feelings who had been kind to me,” but going on to say “I always tried to finish everything I started, if at all possible,” and so she finished her story in recent years.

She writes of the typhoid fever epidemic that took her grandfather, a grandfather who was a bugler in the Civil War and later taken prisoner in the south, a grandmother who practiced midwifery in the South Mountains of Pennsylvania. In detail she describes her life as it was growing up with a mother with severe rheumatoid arthritis and a father who died at a young age from an injury while working for the government building post offices.

In January of 1918 Grandma and her siblings were placed in an orphanage and so she dedicates her “book” to “all those who have been suddenly thrust out into the world without a home, to fend for themselves.”

I get to take my new little granddaughter, Evee, with me (Jamie, too) and we’ll get a picture of five generations that span 100 years. Pretty amazing!