SECOND STREET
Grandma boarded the Greyhound bus, her four foot eleven stoic self clothed in her homemade small-printed flower house dress, although some of the stoicism may have shrunk her to four foot nine. In the bend of her elbow her handbag clung tightly to her side for safety, and her proper yet soft, black lace-up grandma shoes kept her balanced as she boarded the bus. She took it upon herself to journey the distance from White Salmon to Second Street and it was a big deal for her, for us. We needed her and she was coming.
She came from wealth yet chose to marry a farmer. I wonder how her parents felt about that. And it had been a rough hoe. Grandpa was a hard man, mostly thorns, and she was soft and gentle. The woman knew how to love well and he could not, would not, for he did not possess the vocabulary for such things. But he possessed a work ethic and instilled it into his children and tried to provide for his family, although it had not gone that well. Grandma’s nature allowed her to put up with a lot in her life, and now that Grandpa had passed, she could save her dimes for bus rides. She lovingly tended her roses goodbye, and knew that they would wait patiently for her return to that hilltop.Then she walked, smiling, to the bus station.
I do wonder about her thoughts in those quiet moments on the bus. Perhaps she pondered her fine childhood so many years ago. She took dance and piano and achieved a high level of success in both, and she did well in her studies. She nearly received a full college scholarship but was beat out by a boy in a wheelchair. She was devastated and married Grandpa instead.
Then the children came along and she resigned her compliant self to the hard struggle for existence for the sake of her children.
Surely there was some joy along the way, she thought. How she loved the icy, gurgling river of summer, into which glass jars of fresh milk were loaded for safe-keeping. The peaceful, relieved cows supervised, nodding over a wood fence.
In the afternoons, after the clouds lifted from Mount Adams, the sun warmed the huckleberry-laden meadows at its majestic base. The whole family picked and ate berries until their teeth turned purple and their buckets and bellies were filled. They lay in the grass and heard the elk bulls call each other in the distance.
In spite of the hardships, a person could not ask to live in a more beautiful place, and Grandma felt the joy of it as the bus pulled out of the station.
