Elizabeth Smith

My grandmother, Elizabeth Katherine Smith, was born June 29, 1899, in Grand Junction, a town in Colorado about 250 miles west of Denver. It’s situated on the Colorado River where it meets the Gunnison River, hence the “junction.” The area was originally home to the Ute people with the white farmers moving into the area in the 1880s. So the town wasn’t even twenty years old when Grandma was born.

I never got to know Gramma, not really. She died when I was seven-years-old. By most accounts she was a pretty cool lady. To me she was kinda creepy and just a little annoying. Parkinson’s had confined her to a wheelchair. Her hands shook unless she was reaching for her cup of tea, then they were steady which sort of made my little-kid-self think she might be faking. I know now that’s one of those weird quirks of the disease, steady in some situations with debilitating tremors in others. She also had these crazy black cat eye glasses that, to my adult self look rather awesome but set against her little-old-lady-blue/white hair made her look a little like a muppet. When Gramma and Grampa came to dinner we didn’t get to watch Dick Van Dyke reruns, we watched Hee Haw and Lawrence Welk. A one and a two…

I’m pretty sure she died on St. Patrick’s Day, which was also my best friend Seth’s birthday. Needless to say, St. Patty’s Day has always had a wee bit of a weird connotation for me, especially when you take into consideration that I don’t like beer. I keep trying Guinness thinking that my Irish heritage will kick in. Then I take a sip of the foamy brown slop and that’s that for another two or three years. I think I’m due to try Guinness again in 2015.

About twenty years ago, Mom started giving me things Gramma had saved. Recipes. Some letters and invitations she had received as a child. Poems she had copied by hand. Mom gave me a small black three-ring binder full of these things. Now they are my collection of odds and ends. In looking through it all I’m hoping to learn more about my mother’s mother.

The talented Sarah Swen scanned all of these archival documents, some of them more than a hundred years old, so I can share them instead of stashing them away in a drawer. They are too cool to keep to myself. I’ll be posting them from time to time.

Hope you enjoy them as much as I do.