When Grandma was a girl

Have you ever stopped to wonder what life was like when your grandma was a girl?

Have you ever stopped to wonder what your grandma was like when she was a girl?

Somehow, I think we can be tempted to look at pictures from the past and hear the stories our grandparents tell and forget that once upon a time they really were children. My grandparents weren’t just once a miniature grandma and grandpa. They were children, with childish ways of looking at the world and childish dreams and aspirations.

I’d never really thought about it until one day when I was poking through my grandma’s old papers and found a composition notebook from her health class–in the 1940s.

Reading her penned notes in the margins, I suddenly became aware of grandma as a girl.

World War 2 was raging, and Grandma was apparently quite caught up in the war effort.

“Hitler is horrid, abominable, cruel and absolutely detestable” she wrote in a fit of zeal. She wasn’t at all fond of the axis powers–and didn’t think they deserved a capital letter. No “Axis” for Carol Marie Pierce. She’d write it “axis.” And she declared, “Let’s not bury out hatchets till we bury the axis.” In another location, she wrote that “Hirohito, Mussolini, Hitler: ought to be shot.” Shot was underlined no less than four times–and her parenthetical statement (“They will be too”) afterwards indicated her confidence in the Allied troups.

Her patriotism cam out as she scrawled “V for Victory” and “U.S. strongest nation in the World”. Douglas MacArthur, who apparently was somewhere in Australia, must have been a hero, for Grandma penned a short note to him and Mrs. MacArthur: “I admire your courage.” She encouraged others to support the war effort, with her injunction to “Buy War Bonds and Stamps.”

That’s not to say that all her notes were about the war. She used her best cursive to write out her full name “Carol Marie Pierce” and location “Walnut, Neb”. She wrote of her dislike of studying health. And on occasion, she realized that her brackets could make a nice little face–and spent several lines drawing bracket faces.

It’s odd. That face looks familiar. I’m sure I’ve seen it before. In fact, I’ve drawn it before.

And suddenly I realize that my grandma was once a girl–just like me.