Grandma turns 100, still visits the 'old people' on Sundays

By Cynthia Schnitzler

December 10, 2007 | Last weekend my grandma turned 100 years old. People look at me funny when I say that. They ask, "You mean your great-grandma?" And I have to smile and shake my head. "Nope. My grandma."

I can understand their surprise. Around here, people are married with families by the time people in other parts of the country are just beginning to think about settling down. Some of my friends have grandparents younger than my uncles. But you read right. My grandma turned 100 last weekend.

At first glance, she appears to look like any other grandma. She has short, curly hair and tiny glasses. But beneath this normal-looking facade, she is nothing like any other grandma I've ever met. She still works in her garden, and plays with her dogs, and makes coffee the consistency of roofing tar. And she drinks it black. Normal people like me have to water it down and put three or four tablespoons of sugar and a cup of cream in it before we can stomach it. On Sundays after church, she goes to the nearby nursing home and visits all of the "old people" -- some of whom are almost 20 years younger than she is.

Like a lot of people her age, living through so much has made her a little eccentric. Our whole family is a carrier of the packrat gene, but my grandma's has mutated. While this means that she now has a lot of amazing things that she has collected over the decades, it also means that she has a plethora of junk as well. The poverty of the Great Depression now means that she can't throw anything away, ever -- especially food. Last time I went to visit her I helped her clean her kitchen and found a jar of mayonnaise almost as old as I am.

She grew up in a house without electricity, and told me a story once about how afraid she was of getting electrocuted when she moved into a home that had it. She was afraid that unless something was plugged into every outlet in the house, electricity would leak out into puddles on the floor, and stay there, little invisible deathtraps waiting for some unsuspecting person to walk by. She was afraid she or my grandpa or a guest would step in one of these electricity puddles and be electrocuted. My grandfather tried to explain to her that it wouldn't come out of the outlets unless there was something to conduct it, but she didn't believe him. Not for a long time, anyway. She simply kept things plugged in all the time.

When she was little, and first started going to school, her teacher punished her for writing with her left hand. She was dragged to the front of the class and the teacher hit the back of her hands with a ruler and made her apologize to the class for writing with her left hand. She went home at the end of the day in tears, and when her father heard what the teacher had done, he was furious. He went to school with her the next day, rifle in hand. A little threatening was all it took to make the teacher see things his way, and she never touched my grandmother again.

My great-grandmother was equally short-fused. For a while when my grandmother was little, her mother was very concerned about people trying to rob the house. They had a back porch that the family's dog always slept under, and a huge back yard bordered by the woods behind the house. The dog would bark if anyone he didn't know came into the yard. The back of the house faced away from any direction someone would normally come from, and my great-grandmother believed that anyone coming into the back yard was up to no good, and deserved what was coming to them. My great-grandfather was frequently not home in the evenings, and whenever he was gone after dark and the dog started barking, she simply stood out on the back porch with her gun, fired all six shots into the blackness behind the house, and then went back in to reload. She taught my grandma how to load and shoot it when she was 7.

My grandmother has lived by herself for a long time now, and has become accustomed to her solitude. Though she knows her health is deteriorating, she refuses to reason with my father about the possible benefits of moving in to an assisted living facility. She has said numerous times that she will live on her own until she is completely incapable of doing so, and once told my father that she would rather die than let other people take care of her. Her only concession in this regard has been to allow someone to check on her every day. So for now, despite my father's worry, she will continue to live on her own. She may not have much time left, but she's determined to live the rest of her life on her own terms, and not on anyone else's.

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