Winds of Time

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 12-An Address With a Story.

Prompt: So many stories are tied to a place. (For me, it would be my Grandma’s house.) What is a place that has special meaning for your family?

When I think of my paternal grandparents, especially my grandmother, I think of their home. I am grateful for my vivid memories of that place, especially since the physical house itself no longer exists.

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As a young child, I would regularly visit my paternal grandparents at their home in Lawrence, Kansas. I fondly remember those trips often including a trip to the campus of the University of Kansas. It felt so special to be walking around where my mother and father had met and both attended college. They were even married on campus.

My grandparents actually only lived in Lawrence from 1959-1969. Prior to that, they had lived in Joplin, Missouri. That is where my father went to school, graduating from Joplin High School in 1955. When I was seven years old, my grandparents returned to Joplin, purchasing a home on South Brownell Avenue. It is this home that I associate with both of them, but particularly my grandmother.

The home was a comfortable three-bedroom brick ranch-style home on a quiet residential street a mile from busy Rangeline Avenue (I-49 Business Route.) Usually, when we arrived after driving up from our home in northeastern Oklahoma, my grandfather’s El Camino was parked in the driveway.

I remember walking into their home and always noticing how it smelled. The home itself had a welcoming lilac-perfumed scent. That is, unless my grandmother was cooking.

At Thanksgiving and Christmas, the house was filled with the glorious scents of her amazing oyster dressing (stuffing), turkey, and at least three kinds of pies. It was a holiday ritual for my grandmother to call my father into the kitchen for a taste test of her dressing. I’m pretty sure it always tasted fabulous, but without fail, he would take the spoon from his mouth, finish chewing, hesitate for a moment, and then pronounce, “Needs more sage,” with a twinkle in his eye. My grandmother loved cooking, baking, canning, and candy-making and excelled at all.

Above left, some of my grandmother’s potholders. I suspect my aptitude for creating small, intricate things with my hands—oboe reeds and crewel and cross-stitch embroidery such as that above right, for example—must have been passed along to me from her.

Her house was always immaculate. She even did regular Spring and Fall Cleaning. I remember her attention to so many details about her home: her sheets were always crisp and freshly ironed with a lovely scent. She loved handcrafts. Always displayed in her home were permanent and seasonal ceramics that she had painted by hand and fired. There were doilies on end tables and nightstands, crocheted afghans, toilet tissue covers, and potholders, and hand-decorated felt stockings hung up on the mantel at Christmastime. Besides a free-standing artificial tree for that holiday, she always had numerous ceramic Christmas trees placed around the house as well. (Recently, I’ve seen similar trees on websites now selling for hundreds of dollars!)

I have fond memories of summer evenings spent there, sitting around under their patio awning, slowly rocking in a long metal pistachio-colored porch glider, each of us holding textured glasses of iced tea or “pop.” As the sun started getting lower in the sky, the murmur of cicadas would begin, the ice cubes grew smaller, and those textured glasses became covered in condensation. We stayed outside chatting until it got dark or the mosquitos became too troublesome.

Above left, a restored porch glider the same color and of the same vintage as my grandmother’s.  At right, vintage Imperial “Provincial Amber” Honeycomb flat iced tea glasses, just like my grandmother had. It will set you back upwards of $80 on eBay for these six pieces of nostalgic retro barware.

My grandfather was a person of very few words, but when I think of that house, I think of him sitting in his recliner near the front door, engaging in quiet conversation with my Dad or anyone else who wanted to try to draw him into a conversation.

After my grandfather passed away in 1985, my grandmother lived in the house by herself for a while. But, eventually, she moved to a retirement community in Joplin, and the house was sold. My grandmother passed away in 2005.

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Growing up in northeast Oklahoma, I was used to the prevalence of tornadoes, particularly at certain times of the year. While we had plenty of tornado drills at school and there were occasional sightings nearby, a tornado never touched down anywhere near my hometown.

Joplin has not been so lucky.

On Sunday, May 22, 2011, Joplin was hit by a deadly EF5 tornado that devastated large swaths of the city and was responsible for more than 158 deaths and 1,150 injuries. The cost of the damages totaled $2.8 billion—$4.01 billion in today’s dollars. It was the costliest tornado in U.S. history.

My grandparents had been my only relatives who had lived there, but especially because I had a personal attachment to the city, I followed the news story very closely and with much interest.

The devastation was astonishing. Photographer Aaron Fuhrman’s photographs were widely circulated at the time, including shots of the same locations before and after the tornado had wreaked havoc.

Although we no longer had any living relatives in Joplin, my family was concerned about the devastation from the tornado and whether the cemetery where my grandparents are buried had been in the storm’s path. We were able to find out that Ozark Memorial Park Cemetery was unscathed.

Joplin High School and the surrounding area were totally devastated—on the night of its graduation, as it happened. This was one of countless stories of that dreadful night that would later emerge. It was detailed in the excellent Netflix documentary “The Twister: Caught in the Storm.” (The official trailer is below.) My father informed me that this was not the building where he had attended high school. This was a newer construction.

But what about my grandparents’ former home on Brownell Avenue, we wondered? Eventually, we were able to determine from overhead maps and descriptions of the devastation that that home had been demolished in the tornado.

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The home in which I grew up and in which my parents still live is a couple hours away from Joplin. My parents rarely travel any distance anymore, and there is no one in Joplin to visit anymore. When I return to Oklahoma, my visits are spent with my parents and other family and friends right in my hometown. For all those reasons, no one in my family had been to Joplin since the tornado to see either the immediate devastation or the progress in the cleanup and rebuilding efforts.

However, recently my husband and I flew to Kansas City, visiting my parents as part of a longer road trip. We included Joplin in our travels.

We wanted to go to what had been a favorite lunch counter of my grandparents’ that I used to go to with them and that my Dad went to as a young man as well. My husband and I stopped there for lunch. The food and the atmosphere did not disappoint.

Fred & Red’s was a small diner famous for its homemade tamales and its signature dish–“Spaghetti Red”: chili on spaghetti. It opened in downtown Joplin in 1923 as a luncheonette catering to the large number of miners–many of my relatives among them–who worked in the coal and mineral mines in the tri-state area. Twenty years later, the restaurant moved to a different location. The second location shuttered its doors in 2012, perhaps feeling the economic impact of the previous year’s tornado and its aftermath. Four years later, however, a Joplin native and fan of the restaurant brought back the restaurant and the nostalgia associated with it.

This was an area that had not been affected by the tornado. But I decided that I would like to finally see the new construction on the property where my grandparents’ house had stood on South Brownell Avenue.

Going past the house, we saw that a white fence had been erected in the back yard. It was hard to see much of the yard, but the awning was gone. And now, one could not sit on the patio area and look across the small alley and into the neighbor’s backyard as we had done so many years ago, for many years enjoying watching the neighbor’s Westie, “Bandit,” play outside.

As wistful as I felt, knowing that the place I had known was gone, I found it difficult to feel real sadness when I realized how grateful I was that the tornado had not come at a time when she had been alive and living in that house. I cannot even imagine how terrifying it would have been for her to need to seek shelter quickly and how worried we would have all been about her.

Not only do I have passed-down mementos from her home and many examples of her beautiful handiwork, but more importantly, I have the vivid memories that I have described here.

Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.” — L.M. Montgomery