Ode to Grandma Nola

My mom's mom, Nola LaVon Simmons would have been 88 years old today. Because my mom died when I was 13, Grandma Nola became a very important person in my life.

She was never quite the same after the death of my mom. It is said that children should not go before their parents; that there no pain like that.

She lived with a lot of pain in her life.

She got married at age 15 to Myron Simmons who was 30. He owned a dry farm North of Ririe, Idaho and they began their life together there. They were very happy. First came a son, Kay and then two years later , a dark haired brown eyed daughter named Bonnie, my mom. When Bonnie was a year and a half, Myron got pneumonia and died, leaving Grandma Nola (not yet 19) a widow with two small children and the dry farm to run.

This is where I believe Grandma Nola developed her grit, her strength to get through anything.

Years later, she married one of the farm hands and had another son, Ronnie. Eventually, they divorced and she sold the farm and moved to town (the big metropolis of Idaho Falls). She spent many years alone until marrying her 3rd husband, whom she was with until he died of cancer five years before she passed away in 2000.

Grandma Nola was a fiesty red head who, I learned, wasn't a natural redhead at all. One day I gave her a permanent on her hair and told her not to put any thing else on it, like color, for at least two weeks. The next day I went back to see how the perm and she was doing.

"Grandma, did you put something on your hair?" I asked.

"No", she insisted as she turned around. There, on the back of her ear, was a big red glob of something. "Are you sure?" "Yes", she insisted again.

The bottle of "Fanciful Flaming Red" in the bathroom dashed the notion that red hair ran in my family.

Then there's the time she called me, mortified, after she had gone to Albertsons.

"Land", she said, "everywhere I went in that store, people gave me the most awful looks! I thought they were so rude. Then I walked past the freezer section and saw my reflection in the glass. I forgot that I had put on one of them cucumber facial masks on before I left. I looked like a dried up old ghost. I couldn't even get my groceries, I had to get out of there!"

As she got older, she fell and broke her hip and elbow and was in a long term care facility. I always wished I could take care of her, but with me living in Boise and she in Idaho Falls, it was not to be.

One day I went to visit her and took James, who was 13 at the time, with me. I sat on the bed, she was in a wheelchair and James sat straight across from her. She got very fidgety and was fussing about something. Finally she pulled up her shirt and exclaimed,

"They won't let me wear a bra in this **** place!"

She then proceeded to "tuck herself" into the elastic waist of her polyester pants, all directly in front of James. It was priceless. And exactly the thing that a parent needs to have happen in the life of a hormonal adolescent.

About a year later, she had to have her right foot amputated due to poor circulation. Richard wrote an essay for English, titled "Ode to Grandma Nola's Foot". It chronicled her life and all of the places her foot had carried her in her life; all the good times and the bad. She was a hard, hard worker, and her foot served her well.

Grandma Nola provided all of us with a lot of humor, a good laugh and many good times. She was always there for me.

I miss her a lot.

But knowing that she and Bonnie are together is enough for me.