Grandma Nash was a flapper

When Grandma Nash passed away 84 years later two days before Christmas 1987 in North Carolina, she had lived through 20 presidents, had seen a man walk on the moon and had watched the Challenger explode over Florida.

She was born into the aptly named Greatest Generation and saw hardships few today can imagine. She told me she once escaped the Oklahoma dust and hitchhiked all the way to Chicago and tried the life of a flapper. For all you non-boomers, a flapper was a fashionable young woman during the 1920s who flouted conventional standards of behavior. She said it wasn’t for her and soon returned home. I can’t begin to tell you how difficult it is to imagine my grandmother as a stylish woman. 

When I first met Grandma Nash, she was already ancient at 60. In all the years I knew her, I never saw her appearance change even a little. Hard work in the cotton fields had hunched her over and given her deep wrinkles on her face. She was prone to wearing shawls, homemade clothes, and old lady stockings that always seemed to be sagging. She was so old-fashioned that she even made her own underwear by hand. I know this because my brothers and I used to throw them at each other when we occasionally saw them drying in the sun on her outdoor clothesline. She was stooped over and small, but she was mean and was quick to grab a switch and use it on my brothers and me.

When my dad married my stepmother, who eventually adopted his five children as he adopted her daughter, Grandma Nash came with the package. After my parents’ marriage, she moved from Olustee, Oklahoma, a little town of less than a thousand inhabitants, to nearby Altus where my dad was stationed at the local Air Force base. Always the dutiful son-in-law, my dad enlisted his three oldest sons (of which I was the eldest) to help haul all of grandma’s junk to her new digs just a few blocks from where we lived. 

It continued that way from then on. No matter where we moved, Grandma Nash was always close at hand. Whenever my old man found us a better place to live, he always made sure she had a suitable place nearby as well. He probably thought it preferable to having her living with us. 

Grandma Nash couldn’t do many things for herself, so my brothers and I would take turns staying the night with her to do her dishes and chores like removing the pile of newspapers from beneath her bed where she threw them every night after reading before going to sleep. The bad part about that job was that her big six-toed cat she called Boxer thought the pile of newspapers was a better place to use than a litter box. Grandma couldn’t reach her toenails, so we took turns with the nasty chore of trimming them. 

She was terrified of tornados. Many times, the sky would turn green, and my dad and I would rush to pick her up, bring her home, and we would all hunker down in the backyard storm cellar. During one particularly active storm, I was helping her down the front steps to my dad’s truck where he was waiting with the engine running. It was raining so hard, it hurt my skin. She suddenly stopped on the last step. “My cat! You forgot Boxer!” I finally got her to the truck and ran back for her stupid cat. Lightning was popping.

I went inside, found Boxer, and just as I was struggling to lock the door with a huge cat in my arms, lightning struck a transformer directly across the street. The boom was enormous, and Boxer lost it. All 12 claws of his two front feet slashed repeatedly through my wet shirt deep into my chest. Finally, he bounced off me and ran under the house and I stumbled back to my old man’s truck a bloody mess. When I got in and closed the door, my grandmother asked me, “Well? Where’s my cat?” My dad took a puff on his pipe and said, “Better go get him, boy.”

We left Oklahoma when my dad was transferred to North Carolina. He drove 1,440 miles in an old Oldsmobile packed with a wife, six kids, his mother-in-law, and her fat cat who slept on his lap the entire distance. Still, he guided us halfway across our nation to do his duty to his country, his family, and Grandma Nash.

Steve Reece is a writer for the Reporter and a known crime fighter. Email him at stevereece@gmail.com.