Three times blessed

Being raised in a two-parent household nowadays is much more unusual than it was 30 years ago. That?s not to say that two-parent households are becoming extinct, but they are declining in numbers.

I was very fortunate growing up. Not only was I raised in a two-parent household, my upbringing was more of a three-parent family. My maternal grandmother lived with my family during nearly my entire youth.

Occasionally, I think of grandma. Recently, I was gathering some information on caregivers and she came to mind.

Grandma was German all the way through. A surname like Hildebrand says it all.

She lived with our family, largely because of necessity.

My grandmother lost her husband to a ruptured appendix when she was in her 30s (33 to be exact). She was left with four children, the oldest not yet 10. The Great Depression was three years in the future.

I don?t know a lot about her life. She never talked about it unless asked. I do know that she had nine siblings, many of whom moved to Texas in the 1920s and 1930s.

Grandma was a farm wife until her husband died. I was told that she came from a fairly well-to-do family who lost it all in the Depression.

After her husband died, grandma and the kids moved to town. I doubt whether she had any employment skills and she didn?t go to school beyond high school. But her family of five had to live so grandma bought a house and did ironing for people in town.

She was still ironing for other people in her 70s. Had her eyesight not deteriorated, I am sure she still would have been handling the iron in her 80s.

How ironing other people?s clothes would pay the bills as well as putting two children through college, I will never know. But she did it. Grandma?s ambition rubbed off on her offspring as one of the boys became the dean of St. Cloud State (Minn.) College and the other comptroller of a large trucking firm.

Grandma was not very tall, five feet at tops, but knowledge can?t be measured in height. She had her own apartment in my parents? house in she shared most of that knowledge with me in late-night chats.

Something I never will forget is when I once answered her question by saying ?nothing.? She promptly told me that nothing is not an answer.

My mother was a stay-at-home mother so she and grandma were quite close. I remember many times the two of them having a conversation in German because they didn?t want me to hear what they were talking about.

My best memories of grandma were developed during the summer. My parents took a two-week vacation nearly every summer (except for the times we went to Arizona in the winter). The vacations opened my eyes to much of the United States as I had been in over 30 states before leaving the next.

As I grew older I became involved in summer sports (i.e. baseball and softball). Not wanting to miss out on those activities, I opted to stay home with grandma (who only went on vacation with my parents when they went to Texas). Those times were special, a time of sharing and a time of learning.

Grandma continued living with the family long after I left. Finally, my mother convinced her to go to a nursing home when her health began deteriorating. She lived until age 98, but that was both a blessing and a curse.

While she said she was fortunate to have such a long life, she lamented the fact that she had outlived most of her siblings and friends.

She also left quite an impression on a grandson.