Robert Larue Murray

Driving in the rural Elimsport area where Nana was born and grew up triggers memories for her.  During a recent drive, she showed me where the old black house, her birthplace, had stood.  The house has been gone for a long time, but Nana’s memories remain.  A few miles away, we drove past Maple Hill Church.  This quaint country church, surrounded by a rusting iron fence, has been there as long as I can remember.  Beside the church is a cemetery with moss-covered markers etched with names eroded by decades of brutal Pennsylvania weather.

Nana and I have driven past this church and cemetery hundreds of times when visiting my brother Bill.  As we drove by the church cemetery this time, Nana said, “That’s where Grace’s baby boy is buried.”  I practically swerved the car off the road.  “I didn’t know Aunt Grace had a baby boy that died.  Did that happen before Jack was born?”  Grace, one of Nana’s older sisters, had one child that I knew about – my cousin Jack. 

“Oh this happened long before she married Tom and before Jack was born.  She had the baby while we still lived in the old black house.”  I did some mental calculations.  Grace was eleven years older than Nana.  Nana moved from the old black house when she was only five or six years old.  That meant Aunt Grace must have been only fifteen or sixteen when she had the baby. 

I had lots of questions for Nana, “Who was the father?  How did Mother and Dad Tilburg react to the pregnancy and the baby?”  Nana had few answers.  She did know the father was a local boy.  They named the baby Robert Larue Murray.  Robert was chosen for Grace and Nana's brother John’s middle name and Larue Murray was the name of the baby’s father.  At only five years old, Nana’s clearest memory was Grace bathing the baby on the kitchen table.  There were no fancy baby bathtubs back then, just an old basin and wash cloth and towel.  Nana kept saying, “He was the prettiest baby.”  I pictured the baby with Aunt Grace’s coal black hair and smiling eyes. 

Nana said the baby died suddenly at only a few months old.  No one knew why he died.  The  family was so poor they couldn’t afford a cemetery plot or marker for the grave.  They buried the baby on the gravesite of Robert Tilburg, a relative of Dad Tilburg. 

Grace died almost 20 years ago.  I asked Nana if she ever heard her talk about the baby.  She said, "No,Grace never talked about it and neither did anyone else in the family."

With no marker on the tiny grave, there’s no record of the baby’s birth and death - nothing to show for the short life of Robert Larue Murray but Nana's childhood memory.

 

 

Tom and Grace Crain and son Jack

Nana's Childhood Homes

Nana was born September 15, 1923 in an old black house on the corner across from Kennedy Cross Roads near Elimsport PA.  The fourth child of Benjamin and Pearl Tilburg's five children, she was the third girl in the family.  Elizabeth was born in 1910, Grace in 1912, John in 1920 and Ben in 1930. 



Old Picture of the Black House with Mother and Dad Tilburg and Elizabeth and Grace. 

Taken before Nana was born.

 

Nana lived in the black  house until one of the most traumatic events of her childhood.  According to Nana, one day her dad got very drunk on moonshine, grabbed her mother and put her head on a chopping block. He was ready to chop off her head with an ax when a neighbor saw him and stopped him before he could strike her. Nana was about five at the time. 

By this time, Elizabeth and Grace were living in an apartment in Williamsport where they worked at the rubber factory. Mother Tilburg took Nana and John and left Dad Tilburg and the black house to go live with Nana's Uncle Bert and Aunt Katherine. It was summer and Nana loved being on the farm. She looks so happy in this photo.

Nana and Uncle Bert, about 1929

 

When winter came, it was too cold to stay in the rooms provided by Uncle Bert and Aunt Katherine.  Nana and John and Mother Tilburg moved to Williamsport to share the apartment with Elizabeth and Grace.  That year Nana was supposed to go to first grade.  She told me she was so shy and upset to leave her mother that she cried every day.  Finally, Mother Tilburg decided to wait a year to have her start school. 

Nana remembers her dad coming to visit them in the apartment.  He brought her and John toys and was trying to convince Mother Tilburg to come back to him.  Nana remembers her mother and dad disappeared into the bedroom and stayed for a long while.  A few months later, her mother was pregnant.  Mother Tilburg, John and Nana moved back with Dad Tilburg into a rented house near Elimsport on the property of Tenner Moore.  Ben was born there in 1930. 

The family lived there until Nana was in her teens when Pap Tilburg built them a house several miles from Elimsport on a winding road leading to the mountain.  She moved into the house when she was seventeen and lived there until she married Stanley Rhone when she was nineteen. 

Nana at the back of the house built by Dad Tilburg

 

Mother's Day 2013

I celebrated Mother’s Day with Nana a week early because I’m going to be on a cruise on Mother’s Day.  Every Mother’s Day is special, but this year I’m reminded how blessed I am to still be able to celebrate with my mom. 

When I arrived on Friday, Nana was ready to hop in the car for a trip to Wendy’s for her menu of a senior coffee with three creams, a plain junior hamburger, half a baked potato and a chocolate junior Frosty.  Nana loves those Frosties! We still had time after Wendy’s to drive to Lewisburg to get new lenses in Nana’s glasses. We got there just before they closed and by 5pm Nana could see much clearer.

Saturday’s plan was lunch at The Fence Drive-in, located along the Susquehanna River just outside Lewisburg.  Nana and all us kids have been going to The Fence since I was school-age.  In my opinion, they have the best fish sandwiches ever made.  Even with Nana’s limited food preferences, the fish sandwich is a hit. She orders her fish sandwich with tartar sauce on the side, her coffee and this time she added applesauce.   She’s really getting wild and crazy!  Sharon joined us and, thanks to our sweet waitress, we got a picture with Nana and “her girls.”

Nana with "her girls", Sharon and Diane at The Fence

Sunday we drove to Nana's church home, St. John’s United Methodist Church.  Nana was excited to give Pastor Mike a copy of her latest story that she’d written.  He and his wife enjoy reading Nana’s stories.  Like Sharon and I, they both encourage her to write more.  Nana especially enjoyed that it was communion Sunday.  Pastor Mike often has to do a home visit for her to have communion so she loved that she could be there in person.

Nana and Pastor Mike

After church, I drove Nana to the Elimsport Cemetary.  The day was perfect - the sky as blue as a post card and bright sun kissed the markers of those who have gone to rest in this peaceful place.   As I held tight to her arm, she wandered through the headstones of her sisters Elizabeth and Grace and their husbands, her brother John who died a year ago and her mother and father, Pearl and Benjamin Tilburg. She enjoys visiting the graves and we always make sure her headstone is clean and shiny as it nestles under a scraggly pine tree between her two sisters. 

After the cemetery, we again returned to Wendy’s for lunch.  After she slurped the last drop of her Frosty, we took a drive through the surrounding countryside, admiring the vibrant spring blossoms and appreciating the precious time together.   It was a wonderful Mother’s Day 2013 and I’m looking forward to celebrating again next year.

Nana at Wendy's

Twenty Years at Sherwood Drive

April 1st, Nana celebrated twenty years in her apartment at 65 Sherwood Drive, Montgomery PA.  The apartments are owned and managed by Warrior Run Development in Turbotville, PA.  In 1992, when Nana's house on Melvina Street became too much for her, and for all of us kids, to take care of, she put her name on a waiting list to move to the rent-controlled Senior apartments just outside Montgomery on Rt. 405.

Waiting is not one of Nana's strong talents (mine either so I guess that's where I get that trait), so those months waiting for an apartment to become available was stressful.  When we got the call early in 1993, we were excited - until we realized we had to sell the house, and clean out all the stuff in her large 2 bedroom house so she could fit into a one bedroom apartment.  Thanks to Dick Penfield at Fish Real Estate, her house sold quickly.  It was a snowy winter and the house was sold before the snow melted the snow bank where Dick had stuck the For Sale sign.  The clean out was a long process and I remember many hours of cleaning out cupboards and boxes in the attic, deciding where to put everything that accumulated since she'd moved there in the 70's.
 
The Yoder's, who manage Warrior Run Development,  were kind enough to let us have the keys the weekend before and by April 1st Nana was settled into her new home.  Although the waiting was hard, the result was worth it.  Her apartment is on second floor with a balcony that faces a cornfield below and and a panoramic view of the mountains, unobstructed by buildings or highways.  In the spring and summer, the mountains are lush with green and in the fall, the distant trees are awash with bright reds, oranges and yellows.  It's a view that many would pay high rent to have and Nana gets to experience it every day with a low rent that fits her tiny budget.

It's not entirely perfect.  Nana can't have her own washer and dryer and still twenty years later hates the idea of the coin-operated laundry facilities.  In the years since 2010 when she experienced three back surgeries, I do most of Nana's laundry when I visit once a month.  She fixes a tiny change purse with an abundance of quarters.  She tells me that I need to take extras because one time when she took exact change with her laundry, one of the quarters rolled under the washer and she had to go back to her apartment for another.  She's made sure that never happens to me. 

I'm grateful for how accommodating the management of the apartments are to their tenants.  When Nana had back surgery and couldn't navigate the steps anymore, I called the office and they arranged for a chair lift to be installed at no charge.  It was ready to use by the time I brought her home from the hospital.  That chair lift has allowed Nana to stay in her beloved second floor apartment and be independent.

One of the best benefits of her apartment is the free maintenance.  When something is broken or leaking, Nana does a work order and Pat the maintenance man comes to fix it.  He's a local guy who went to the same high school I did - Warrior Run High School.  I hope he never retires because Nana enjoys not only his mechanical skills but his kind manner and sense of humor. 

For twenty years, Sherwood Drive is where Nana has lived, but it's not just a place to live, it really is what Nana calls home.

Nana on her balcony in May 2011

Back to Back

Nana's back has always been a problem for her.  She had a hard physical life for many years.  Her weak back could be from carrying heavy wet clothes, run through an ancient wringer washer, up rickety cellar steps to hang on the clothesline outside.  Even after she moved up to an automatic washer, a dryer was a luxury she never got to experience until decades later.

It could also be from carrying water.  The Bower place, a falling down rambling farmhouse, never had running water.  When we moved to the Staggert place in 1957, the whole family was excited to have hot and cold water at the kitchen sink.  The joy was short-lived.  Soon after we moved in, our spring - the only source of water - went dry and Nana had to haul water in tall dented metal milk cans from a mountain spring miles away.  Soon after the spring was freely flowing, the kitchen drain clogged and we had to haul water outside to dump it.  More back work for Nana.

Nana's back took the biggest hit from working over twenty years in a textile factory.  The current term for the factory where she worked would be "sweatshop."  She used a machine called a ball spinning machine to spin wispy multi-colored thread onto small wooden balls.  A hand crank was the only source of power and Nana had to produce grosses of these shimmering balls. Nana saved some of the balls she made and I have a few of them on display in my office to remind me to stop whining whenever I think I'm having a hard day.

In 2010, Nana had three back surgeries called kyphoplasty.  A cement-like material is surgically inserted between compressed vertebrae to stop the pain of the fracture.  In Nana's case, these compressed fractures come from osteoporosis.  Nana always says the doctor has to call for a cement truck delivery before surgery. 

When she was experiencing severe back pain a few weeks ago, the doctor thought we were going to be doing surgery #4. Unfortunately, after two MRI's, the results indicated that nothing can surgically be done to relieve her pain.

In addition to the osteoporosis, Nana has a condition called scoliosis or curvature of the spine.  This complicates her back pain, not to mention her walking and now even her digestion as the condition gets steadily worse.  Nana has accepted this condition.  She's even re-named it.  She calls it "squirrelly-osis."   Thank goodness for Nana's sense of humor and her determination to live her life the way she wants in spite of all her back problems. 

 

Nana-isms

The title of my blog today is Nana-isms.  These are phrases that Nana uses that are unique to Nana’s vocabulary, like…..

“It’s raining cats and dogs and hammer handles.”  I asked Nana where she heard this phrase and she said that her mom and dad said it when she was growing up.  I’ve heard the “cats and dogs” phrase, but I’m clueless where the hammer handles come into the picture.  Nana didn’t know either but it seems normal to her because she’s been saying it all her life.

While I was combing Nana's grandkitty, Mitzi and talking to Nana on the phone one morning, Nana remarked that she had already combed her hair for the day.  Then she delivered the newest Nana-ism “Brush your teeth and comb your hair and you’ll look like a millionaire.”  She told me she heard the phrase in her childhood.  It’s amazing to me I’ve never heard her say that before.  Nana can always surprise me.

Another famous Nana-ism is a phrase she calls “storm air.”  When she walks outside and the air penetrates with cold and moisture, Nana says it’s a “storm air.”  The funny thing is she's usually right.  After her pronouncement, a storm is not far behind.

At 89 years old, Nana gets tired more easily now than when she was younger.  I’m always encouraging her to take a nap in the afternoon, especially when she hasn’t slept enough the night before.  Her answer is always the same, “I’m not a daytime sleeper.”  She states this Nana-ism like any indisputable fact.  That’s the end of the discussion.

Whenever Nana and I are talking about numbers, whether it be her checkbook total, or the price of bananas, she frequently says, “go figure.”  That’s one of her favorite Nana-isms.  For Nana to “go figure” she uses a pencil and piece of paper, not a calculator.  This woman can add and subtract in her head faster than I can enter the numbers in a calculator.  She still does her own checkbook and balances her bank account statements every month.  She may only have an eighth grade education, but she does know how to “go figure.”

As I write this, it’s starting to rain - I'm waiting to see the “cats and dogs and hammer handles.”

 

 

Nana and Snow

 

We had 3 inches of snow in Virginia today.  Whenever I talk to Nana about snow, she loves to tell the story about the time that she was in Austin in 1943 and they had snow there for the first winter in 17 years.  She says that the kids went wild, throwing snowballs, even breaking windows in their excitement.  Most of those kids had never seen snow before.  Of course, it didn't stay long in the warmer Texas temperatures but it truly was an event to remember.

 Nana also told me when she was a kid, she and Uncle John walked to Pikes Peak School in the winter.  She said the snow was as high as the fences they crossed.  The teacher lived next to the school so there was no "snow days" for them to get a vacation from school.

Below is a picture of Nana and Uncle Ben during the winter with snow on the ground while she lived at home in Elimsport area with Grandma and Grandpa Tilburg.  Nana was probably in her late teens and Uncle Ben was 7 years younger.  Nana is holding a guitar.  When I asked her about the guitar, she said it was Uncle John's.  She liked to strum on it sometimes but didn't really play.  She told me Uncle John used to play the guitar for square dances.  The old car they are posing in front of she thinks is a Ford, because Grandpa Tilburg usually bought Fords. 

Nana and Uncle Ben

 

Nana has seen lots of winters.  We talked recently about the blizzard of 1996 and the flood that followed. We both remembered that as one of the worst in history.  I guess this 3 inches of snow today is really no big deal.