This title may be misleading as you probably think this is my reflection. Not so. In researching for another project, I came across this essay by my grandmother, Myra Kendig Lehman. As I read it, I was struck by the ways I sound like her, both in what she says and the way she reflects on life experiences. Clearly, I learned more from her than the stories she told. I note too how accurately she captured the essence of me and my sisters, even at our young ages of five, four, and two–Kathie the story-lover (therapists spend most of their time listening to stories), Carol the musician, and Dorothy Jean the theologian and singer.

So here is Grandma’s unedited essay, written when she was 56 and I was five and a half.

Truly being a grandmother is interesting in a number of different ways.  As a grandmother who is half past fifty, I feel as though I am standing in the midst of the generations.  I have pleasant and vivid recollections of a grandfather who would now be one hundred and twenty-three years old if he were living and of a grandmother almost as old.  So today I can reach back in memory and recall some stores they told me.  These people who started life more than a century ago were my own folks and were dear to me.  Today when my little granddaughter Kathie says, “Tell me about when you were a little girl” I go back and tell her about the little candy cupboard that my grandfather, her great-great-grandfather, had and how every time my sister and I visited him he never failed to go to it and get some candy for a parting gift, and of how he used to give us nickels to buy pink ice cream, and of the Thanksgiving days when the whole clan would come together and then our grandmother, her great-great-grandmother, would tell all of us children to go in a room by ourselves and shut the door and to have all the fun we wanted to, also of how in each summer we used to all go to grandfathers for a Saturday evening strawberry treat, and of how I used to see them sitting in the old buggy driving to church.  As I reminisce, Kathie’s interest never fails and gradually she learns to know these dear grandparents of four generations ago.  Through me they speak to her.

Again the request comes, “Tell me about when you were a little girl,’ and I tell her how my father, her great-grandfather, would ask my mother, “Do you need Myra in the house today?”  and how I’d hope my mother would say, “No, I don’t need her,” which she usually did say, and then how I’d go with my father, her great-grandfather, and we’d fix fences, cut weeds, pick up apples, haul in corn and do all kinds of work together where I didn’t really help much at all, just kept him company, but he talked about many things and taught me many things which I am still teaching her today.  I tell her how he taught me to enjoy a thunder storm and to not be afraid of hounds barking in the night and to know that the old screech owl on the wind pump couldn’t hurt me even though he screeched and chattered all night.  Also how he condemned irreverence in church and how he always read Luke 2 on Christmas Eve.  Then, too, I tell her of those memorable days when my mother, her great-grandmother, took me along on rare occasions to the farmer’s market (just like in her Henner’s Lydia book) or of the fun of shopping in the city [Lancaster, PA] especially at Christmas time and of how she tried to teach us to have things nice and neat and clean and straight, both in the way we looked and in the way we lived.  Again, through me my parents speak to my granddaughter.

Then another day the “Tell me a Story” centers around myself, her grandmother.  Now she is aware of and acquainted with my generation and I speak directly to her.  I tell her of my school days with always, by her request, special emphasis on the Christmas programs.  I tell her of things her grandpa and I did together when we were younger, how we moved to Virginia and lived in a little house close to the College, and then I came to the wonderfully absorbing story of the day we had a little baby girl of our own and how this baby grew up to be her mother.  Then comes the logical request, “tell me about when mama was a little girl.”  To satisfy this request I dip into my recent memories, aware that now I am becoming the older generation.  I tell her of her mother’s babyhood, childhood, school days, love and marriage and then we come to that part of the story which always makes her eyes sparkle and her little body wriggle with excitement as she and I travel in our imagination to Kentucky and go in to the dear little home on Lost Creek and there by the big stove, with her proud and happy papa and mama looking over our shoulders, we peep into a pretty baby basket and get our first glimpse of the sweet sleeping little baby which is—HERSELF.  And now she is aware of her own generation and I am aware that I am a grandmother. 

With this awareness on my part I enter another interesting phase of life.  The years go by and there are more grandchildren.  In their features, in their mannerisms, in their likes and dislikes, in their sweetness and in their tantrums, I can look back fifty odd years and see another wide-eyed, curious pig-tailed little maid who was myself.  And looking back I can somehow remember through the years the things that made me happy or the things that distressed me.  Or I look at the generation between me and Kathie and I see her mother.

I see her full of fun, playing make-believe, telling original stories, baptizing her sisters with sand, afraid of noises in the night–in fact in so many ways so like the little girl who was myself and in so many ways like the five year old Kathie who is now that I sometimes must wonder if they all three lived in spaces of time each separated by a quarter century or whether they all lived simultaneously.

Some other interesting things I see in my little granddaughters are the very definite separate, distinctive features that make up their respective personalities.  Maybe you have noticed that I have mentioned only Kathie as the one who says, “Tell me a story.”  Well, Carol just isn’t interested in ancient history, but she will run to the living room at the first sound of a note from the piano and sitting in the big chair hard by will request, “Gwampa, please play ‘Star of the East,’” now please play “Onward Christian Soldiers,” or she will say, “Please play records for me.”  Kathie needs playmates to have fun while Carol can enjoy herself by the hour singing, playing records, putting puzzles together or playing with blocks.  Jeanie is still pretty young, but I can already see interesting traits in her.  A while before she was two, she announced at lunch one day, “’ets have a joke” and immediately she started to laugh and laugh and laugh until she brought down the house, so I am sure she has a sense of humor. . . She also loves to sing, and should you chance to pass by some day you may hear her singing “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” or the “Doxology,” or her chief favorite “Happy Day.”

As a grandmother I continually find myself comparing my grandchildren with my own children.  Is this later generation more mature at a given age than their parents or grandparents?  It seems so, but we easily forget.  I am sure though that they have traveled abroad far more than their forebears.  Kathie at five and a half speaks as nonchalantly of going to Iowa, Wisconsin or Kentucky as I did of going to Grandfathers or to Uncle Bens who lived barely a mile from home. Also her vocabulary has, I venture to guess, several hundred more words in it than her grandmother’s had at her age.  This morning she received a bouquet from a neighbor, and she suggested that we find just the right vase for it and then that we do not put it in the kitchen because quoting her, “there is already so much nature around our kitchen windows; I think we should put it in the living room and then won’t mother be surprised at the fragrance.”

Well, let these ramblings suffice.  Just recently I read that there are very few children who are interesting to anyone else than their parents and grandparents, and so humbly admitting this statement to be true I shall bring these ramblings to an end and quietly bow out.

  May 1952, Mrs. C. K. Lehman—56 years old, Kathie—5 ½ years old