Nana Stories

One of the neat things about having Nana nearby is that I get to hear stories from her. Not just the major, life changing stories, like how she met Papa, or what it was like to have kids in Juneau's early days, but normal stories.  I wanted to capture a few of them here for my siblings/ nephew and niece.

Last weekend over dinner I was talking about reading the Monuments Men (about the effort to save art, artifacts and monuments during WWII), and I confessed that I know embarrassingly little about world history. Did you know that Germany tried to invade Russia? Which is why Russia ended up in the war? And that we weren't exactly on the same side? Matt and I bemoaned that Juneau schools never seemed to take history very seriously, so now we are just ignorant adults. Nana said she also didn't get much world history. In high school she was on the annual commitee (yearbook), and she has this very sweet, very dull world history teacher. Should would just come in the class, flash him a smile and say, "I have to work on some things for the annual. Can I do the assignment next week?" and he would let her out of class. Pretty much all year. Seriously. I never pegged Nana for ditching class.

Earlier this week, we were talking about hot water heaters, and Nana reminisced about how when she was growing up, their hot water tank was basically uninsulated, so you could feel on the site how much and how hot the water was. (I assume Nana's Mom had impervious hands as well.) Nana said her mom always seemed to have infinite energy. I have heard he describe the garden that kept the family fed all year, especially when beans, fruits or other things were ready for canning. Because it was a large garden, there were huge spurts of urgency where Grandma Sandlin would have both Nana and Auntie Jeanne in the kitchen, canning for hours. Nana said she could see out the window that it was blue skies and sunny, but she was always caught in the sweltering kitchen heat. And at the end of a major canning effort, her every energetic mother would pat the hot water heater and say, "Come on girls, we still have enough hot water to do a load of laundry." I thought of how ambivalent I can feel about laundry when I'm tired, and then she told me how they DID laundry: manually. They would fill up two tubs, one with soap and a rinse that they would run it through a ringer, and they drop it into the second rinse, with "bluing" and then ring that out, and then hang it all out to dry in the sun. Just hearing that makes me want to flop into a frazzled domestic mess, but she said her mom never wanted her dad to see how much work it was. He liked to see her looking calm and relaxed when he came home from work, so she always made time to clean up from all these things, including scrubbing the floor, brushing her hair and changing her apron so that when her dad got home things were calm and quiet. I asked if she was ever able to achieve that standard with her own kids, and she just laughed.

We had planned to see her and Jerry this week to have dinner and go to the movie Saving Mr. Banks. Due to my poor planning (oh, the movie starts when?) and our general lack of urgency, we missed the movie, but it was nice to have dinner with Nana and Jerry. Just like "old times" before the folks moved here.

Oh, and I feel like bragging. As I mentioned we had a really great time at MOHAI a couple weeks ago, and when I mentioned this to Nana and Jerry, they thought it sounded cool, too. So cool, in fact, that they got one of the buses to take a load of people down there for the day. And they ALSO enjoyed it a lot.

Matt has been busy this week. He gave a talk on Friday, and is gearing up for the mountain bike race series. This means making changes and updates to the bike, that seemed to involved new wheels, and new cables, and many hours in the garage. He really enjoys that.