A story is like a hidden treasure. Once found, its worth is more than a chest of gold. When I was a little girl, I loved listening to my grandma’s childhood stories. Her experiences were so similar to mine—such as fear of the boogey man; yet it was also fascinatingly different as she had lived in a different era from me during the 1920s and 30s.
An Assignment Worth its Weight in Gold
When I was a sophomore in high school, my English class was given an assignment to interview someone who had lived during the Depression. I wrote a letter to my grandma telling her about my assignment and asking for her story. Little did I know at the time what a treasure that letter would become. By the time I thought of writing her regularly to ask her about her life stories, she had experienced a stroke and had gotten Alzheimer’s. She was still capable of remembering her childhood, but unable to remember reading a letter—let alone having enough memory to respond and mail it. All I knew about her life was the Depression letter and a few memories from the stories she had told me during my preschool years. A decade later, I took her letter and self-published “Grandmother’s Great Depression Story.”
Memories of Grandmother
My grandma and I were very close. I spent a lot of time at her house growing up. Grandma liked to tell the story how when I was a toddler, whenever my parents got into the car, if we didn’t turn towards Grandma’s house, I would burst into tears. But Grandma and I didn’t live “happily ever after.” When I was seven-years-old, Grandma retired from her waitressing job and moved out of Washington and returned to her childhood state of Idaho. It was the month of November when she had left. My family had sold our house in October and my brother and I were sent to go live with her during the month of November while my parents worked on getting a house on the property we were moving to. That Christmas would be my first Christmas in our new house—and my first Christmas without Grandma. I seldom saw my grandma after she moved. Someday, I hope to write another short story based on her childhood based on the memories I have of her oral storytelling.
Comments
When you were growing up, did you get to listen to family stories? What were they?
Author Amy Trees 