Goin' Fishing.

My grandma went fishing with her best friend, Marvella, the other day. She goes fishing often, in every season. In the winter, she gets my Uncle Gordy to set up the ice house for her. He always says, "You want me to stay, Ma?" And she says, "Only if you're going to fish!"
Grandma was born in 1923 on a kitchen table a mile and a half from where she currently lives. If you follow Highway 9 out of Rock Rapids, take a right turn to George on Kennedy Avenue, then take a right at Johnson's farm, you can still see the old place. I'm sad every time I drive past it, because the house is gone, and there's nothing left except a gravel drive and a mailbox that says "Eberline." The grove (if you aren't from farm country, every farm has a grove of trees surrounding the homestead) is nearly dead, tangled and black. The house that used to sit to the left of the drive was beautiful; a skinny two-story with a pointy roof, dormer windows, and lacy porches. Blue and red stained glass doors, heavily flourished with details, sat sentinel at the "parlor" entrance, which no one ever used. If you were a visitor to the house, you were automatically a friend and came through the kitchen entrance.
When Gram went into the nursing home in 1987, literally kicking and screaming after wrecking her 1963 green Plymouth, the house sat empty of people, but filled with her things. Grandma Simdorn came every week to clean, even though Gramma Lilli was never coming home. When Lilli died in 1994, we had a family auction for her things, and the house became a ghost, empty and withering until 2003, when they finally tore it down. I always wished someone would have bought it and kept up the farm, but everything's gone now, including the barn, garage, and the ancient see-saw outside the big living room windows. The farmers who rent the land from my grandma plowed over the grass and planted beans there.
After Grandma was born, Lilli couldn't have any more kids, so she adopted them. I mean, she literally took in kids in the county that no one wanted. Over the years, she fostered several baby girls and boys, and officially adopted Clinton in 1930. Grandma went to live "in town" with her grandparents for high school, and it was on the streets of George she met my Grandpa in 1939. Grandpa Russ was a farmer, working for his aunt and uncle, and never finished the eighth grade. He was handsome and funny, and always causing trouble, but never getting caught. He didn't speak a word of English until he was 14, because in rural Iowa in the early part of the century, the farmers spoke Low German, an unwritten dialect brought from the poor fifedoms on the outskirts of Bern, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Munich. Until the day he died he scrambled English around to suit himself.
Grandma was one of the only people in her class to go to college, getting through by tutoring and "not eating on Sundays," because she only had enough food money for "six days in the week." She laughs now at how thin she was when she came home from college.
They married in 1944, renting the land they lived on until they could scrape together enough money to buy it. There was no money for groceries, so they ate what they grew. On Friday nights, there were shooting contests at the gun club, and the winner got a free bag of groceries. Lucky Grandpa Russ was a good shot. When Lora was born, then Allan, then Lila, they could feed everyone at dinner for seventeen cents: toast with meat on it, milk from the cow, vegetables from the garden. Everyone had one piece of toast except Grandpa, who got two.
Things got better, because as Grandmas says, "Persistence and determination are the keys to success." By the time tag-a-long Marla was born, the farm was prospering, with cows, chickens, pigs, geese, and even a horse. And so it went, as everyone grew and had kids of their own, and Grandma went back to teaching school. In 1988, Grandpa was out on the tractor when he collapsed, his body filled with three aneurysms: one in each leg and one on his aorta. I don't know how, but he survived. They spent the next 13 years travelling, to Germany, England, and of course, all over the US. Finally one morning in August 2001, a month before the whole world turned upside down, Grandpa collapsed during breakfast, finally at rest.
And so she's perservered alone since then, keeping busy, never showing her tears, and never admitting how lonely she is.
I don't remember Grandma Simdorn ever having a cold, and she had never been in the hospital until a month ago. I guess they call it a bowel obstruction, but whatever it was, it knocked her flat. It's always frightening to see someone you love sick, but we were worried; she'd never been sick before, and I think we all sort of viewed Grandma as indestructible. At least, I did.
So you can imagine my delight when I talked to her on the phone this week and she had been out fishing.
"We caught 22, and Marvella cleaned them, because I always drive the truck and the boat."
I wish I could see it...two old ladies sitting on the lake in an ancient fishing boat, hats on, lines cast, pulling up fish after fish.