A tribute to my Grandma

When my Grandma died in December 2009 I was asked to speak at her funeral, I declined, I can’t speak in public even in happy times, my face gets red and I begin to mumble and speak fast, I avoid it at all cost.  However I wanted to be a contributor to remember one of the strongest women I have ever known, so I did what I do best, I wrote, designed, and created her funeral program.  At first glance this entry into a blog about farming and its role in hunger might seems strange, but not so much once you understand my Grandma Virginia and her story of survival of near starvation in the dust bowls of the thirties.

My Grandma Virginia was born in Oklahoma in 1924; she was 4 when she first remembered the winds beginning to blow on her family’s farm.  Her dad was a sharecropper who scraped by just enough of a crop every year to feed his family of five kids, my grandma being the baby of the group.  When the land stopped producing and the banks came calling for their note her dad over taken with too much burden left the family to starve to death on their Oklahoma farm. She never laid eyes on her dad again, something hardened on her heart that day that would never go away.   My great-grandmother Lucas wasn’t going to sit by and let her family die, she made a deal with her neighbors and soon after she and her young family where headed to California holding those same flyers that promised work for all. 

If people thought times were tough for families, try being a single woman with five kids competing against men in the field. My grandma and her family lived through every struggle that the Joad family encountered in Steinbeck’s book The Grapes of Wrath.  They made it to California only to find no work and high predigest. They lived in transit camps and sometimes went days with nothing to eat.  One of her brothers would eventually die from malnutrition.  After spending almost a year following the harvest up and back the state they settled in Salinas, California where the boys and my great grandma worked on cannery row for many years before settling in Santa Cruz. Where she met and married my Papa and continued to live the life of a farm wife as she became to matriarch of Bella Orchards, a huge apple ranch running out of Aptos, California.

Those hard years of starvation forever changed my grandma, the hard shell that formed around her heart when her dad left them to die never softened.  She was fun and easy to get along with but these was always a wall to prevent someone from getting too close, even her own children and grandchildren.

The following was my last tribute to the woman who taught me to what it means to take care of your family.  That you can fight against any thing the world had to throw at you as long as you fought it with family.

NOTE: I did not write the poem on page two, I got it from a website dedicated to poems to use for funerals.