Violet

As a child, I was afraid of Grandma Allen.

Her real name was Violet, though nothing about her seemed delicate to me then.

She lived in the little house down the hill from Grammax and Grandpa Jesse. Her kitchen was dominated by an old woodstove that radiated both warmth and danger. If she was cooking, children were not allowed near it.

The kitchen always smelled faintly like a pot had boiled dry and something frying in bacon grease. The woodstove made the room feel too hot even in winter.

I remember standing in the doorway just long enough to be noticed before her voice came sharply across the room.

“Get out of here!”

I obeyed immediately.

As a little girl, I thought she was frightening.

I once watched her break a chicken’s neck and was horrified. My Grandpa Carrol liked to tell stories about how, as a boy, he and his friends would gather walnuts in the road near her property and Violet would chase them away. In every story, she seemed fierce. Protective of her space. Protective of what belonged to her.

It was only much later that I began to understand that some women become hard because life required it of them.

As a young woman, Violet married a man named Jesse Williams. He dreamed of performing magic on the vaudeville circuit and eventually left her and their newborn son to travel and perform.

Later, he contacted her again. He told her he had made a terrible mistake. He asked her to sell their belongings, bring the baby, and meet him in Kansas City.

She did.

He took the money and abandoned her there.

I try to imagine what that must have felt like. A young woman with an infant son, stranded far from home, discovering that the man she loved had disappeared again.

She returned to Council Bluffs and rebuilt her life as best she could.

Later, she married a man named Jim Chance. But only three years into the marriage, he died. Once more, Violet found herself alone after building a life around someone she loved.

Three years later, she married Clarence Allen and moved to Sidney, Iowa, to the land where my mother would eventually grow up.

By the time I knew her, all of those earlier lives had hardened into capability.

The women of my childhood often expressed love through work rather than words. They fed people. Gardened. Preserved food. Watched for danger. Endured things. Kept going.

Violet did all of those things fiercely.

My mother was her only grandchild for many years, and much of what I eventually came to understand about Violet came through stories told later, after I was old enough to interpret them differently. After my dad finished dental school and my parents moved to Texas during his Air Force service, Grandma Allen mailed wild mushrooms to my mother.

Wild mushrooms.

When my mom told me that story years later, I unexpectedly got tears in my eyes.

Because suddenly I could see it.

A farm woman in rural Iowa gathering mushrooms from the earth and carefully sending them across the country because her granddaughter was far away and she loved her.

Not everyone knows how to say “I miss you.”

Some people mail mushrooms.

She also kept a glass candy jar in the living room that was always filled with burnt peanuts. I can still picture the small red candies against the glass.

My father has that jar now.

To this day, it still sits in his house filled with burnt peanuts, as though some small part of Violet continues to insist upon it.

Toward the end of her life, dementia slowly carried Violet away from us. I remember visiting her in the nursing home where she lived. Grammax went to see her every single day.

Sometimes Violet would call me Betty, my mother’s name.

Mostly, though, she no longer knew who I was.

The older I get, the more tenderness I feel toward women I once misunderstood.

As a child, I knew Violet mostly through caution. Through being warned away from the woodstove. Through the sharpness in her voice. Through the terrible efficiency of farm life.

But as an adult, I inherited another understanding of her.

I see now that she spent much of her life trying to hold onto the people she loved.

And perhaps that is why she guarded everything so fiercely:

her kitchen,

her land,

her family,

her grandchildren,

her life.