A Grand Adventure

“Grandpa and I were married on October 11, 1952.  We had very little money, no car, no house, no furniture.  Grandpa was in the Navy and we spent our first 10 months of the marriage in Foley, Alabama in a little 3 room rented cottage a few miles from the Navy Base….  It was my first time away from home but I was with the love of my life and our short time living there was a wonderful adventure.”

I had just gotten home from the showing.  The previous week my beloved grandma, Mary Jane Schroeder, had passed away at the age of 93.  As the oldest grandchild, whose dad was born during that brief stint in Foley, I had been blessed with nearly a half century of love and commitment as embodied by grandma Schroeder.

During the memorial, my uncle had passed along a grandparent’s journal to me and my cousins/siblings that grandma had kept for each us.  In the opening pages, she told the story of the first decade of marriage, and grandpa’s time away in the aftermath of the Korean War.  As a young mother raising five kids in her first decade of marriage, there was many reasons to worry.  Knowing grandma as I did, she could certainly be a “worry wart”, often having difficulty letting go of the tasks or issues at hand, and just relaxing in the moments that were. 

Decades prior to her passing, I sat down to interview my grandparents about their early life.  Born into the lower working class, and truly living paycheck to paycheck as they raised their own kids, I listened to grandma tell the story of how their life together began. Having gotten to know her so well, I was struck by not just the abiding faith by which she accepted where the first years of marriage had taken them, but the sense that this adventure, with hardly any resources to speak of, was on the grandest of scale.  Her joy was not muted by her fear.

In our current era of anxiety and fragility, even with all the assurances that our modern society has brought, grandma’s words echo ever so loudly.  No fortune in the world can take the place of faith; no pleading can take away the adventure.  We can tolerate it, we can bemoan it, but as grandma would say, why would we not own it…so wonderfully?