Lola Berry

My mother's mother walked across a frozen, creaking, moaning Ohio River in 1918 during a record-cold winter. This young Lola Berry and her dangerous adventure, sticks with me, because as a child I could not reconcile the story of my young grandmother with the invalid I knew growing up. This refined, Owensboro, Kentucky lady seemed forever old to me. The grandmother I knew had been sick forever, or at least my whole life, all ten years of it. I grew up with Grandmother because she was an invalid and could barely walk, so I couldn't imagine her crossing her bed room, much less the wide Ohio River. My grandmother always sat rocking in a chair that was solely hers, and she elegantly smoked Lark cigarettes with a long, black filter. Grandmother saved the charcoal cigarette butts and crushed them between her fingers into a coffee can so she could eventually add them to the soil of summertime flowers. She drank tall, bottles of Royal Crown Cola, and from her I learned the art of finding contentment in a rocking chair. My Grandmother Berry had exceptional dove gray eyes that were beautiful, and even as a young child I recognized that. Grandmother often sat in her chair and stared across the room, seeing images from a past far beyond my busy, bobbing head, far beyond the walls of her room in our suburban house.

"She was considered the most beautiful woman in Owensboro," stated my mother, when we looked through old photo albums, the only path I had that led to my Grandmother's world. I could not find a door to connect the stylish image of a high-heeled, mink-wrapped, coiffured lady, with the silent, sick shell of a woman who rocked in an old wooden chair and slowly exhaled prayers of, "Mercy, mercy, mercy." with the smoke of her cigarette. The disparity between the two images was too great for my young brain to process. But both pictures are now fixed in my memory, my Grandmother forever smiling coolly on the arm of my granddad who wore a jaunty straw hat tilted rakishly to the side as they posed in the hot summer sun of Owensboro in the late 1920's, and the dowager-backed, aged invalid of my childhood in the 1970's.

The woman I knew rarely smiled. She rocked in her chair and smoked. I enjoyed being with her and my granddad because I practiced rocking with her every evening in front of a blazing fire in a tiny red lacquered chair that was just my size. I threw wads of tissue paper into the fire and was dutifully careful and quiet as I watched them burn from the perch of my chair. Occasionally I would tear my eyes away from the dancing flames to watch my grandmother smoke her cigarette in its sleek black holder, and the smoke would curl slowly about her head until it disappeared beyond her long, silver hair, forever knotted in a lovely chignon at the nape of her neck. I pensively imagined what it would be like to rub my own cigarette butt between my fingers making that unique sound of charcoal crushing which mesmerized me every time my Grandmother crumbled butts. But I instinctively knew mine could not sound as hypnotic as hers. In this dream-like state I saw the butt between her fingers at the same time I heard the sound, and I knew without thinking that my hands would never look as elegant as hers did at any task. The ends of my fingers were square. I had work hands. Grandmother's were finely oval with long, lovely nails arching elegantly across the top of each finger. Those lovely fingers were often employed by my mother. At Mother's request, Grandmother would take those delicate fingers and use them to make perfect stitches in the hems of skirts and pants still fresh from the Sears and Roebuck store at Washington Square Mall. Grandmother made sewing repairs of all kinds with her beautiful hands, and when she wasn't busy doing that, she would sew intricate needle work until her eyes grew tired. There was a metal light with a snakey neck next to her chair, and she would pull the lamp over and shine the light straight onto her work as she created knotted flowers with colored thread. I loved what she did enough to actually try doing the stitches myself. But I was overcome with the impatience only a rough and rowdy tom-boy of nine can have when she realizes she must sit still to do the work, and a bicycle outside was calling.

When I was 17, long after my grandmother had died, there was another record cold winter. I only had my driver's license for a year, but I drove my friends from Evansville to Newburgh just to look at the mighty Ohio River frozen solid from the Indiana to the Kentucky shore...something it hadn't done since 1918. I remember looking over the icy expanse with my friends and hearing its moans as the muddy water flowed treacherously underneath. I wouldn't have walked across that river for love or money, and I was the most daring person out of my group of friends. No way, no how. My grandmother? I shook my head. She must have been something.

I wish I had spent more time with the quiet, rocking woman who rarely left her room, who rarely left her chair, so I could have known the girl who crossed that crazy frozen river in 1918. Now approaching 50, I look at my past: Kodac moments captured in the fading kodachrome colors of childhood. I see a photo of a little girl wearing Redball Jets in a red rocking chair, smiling at a grandmother who is not quite in the picture That girl seems as happy as my own granddaughter is today when she sits in the same old red rocking chair and smiles at me. I know I must build a bridge of memory for my granddaughter to a grandmother she can never know, and the girl that I can barely imagine. I must use scraps of sound and smells, of conversation, and memories of smoke, cigarette filters and RC Cola, until we are back to the winter of 1918 and in the life of the bold, young girl who became my grandmother.

Today my granddaughter and I often visit the old dam site in Newburgh, Indiana along the Ohio River, the common element that that flows through black and white photos, and our lives. In the oppressive summer heat of Kentuckiana, the idea of an ice-locked river is as far away as my long dead grandmother. My granddaughter and I eat ice cream cones, and I rock my little Bella in my lap. I tell her stories of long ago , and of our beautiful grandmother, a girl who braved the cold, and forever walks across the river of our memory. We look across the water at the beautiful Kentucky shore, my granddaughter and I, and in our minds we see the girl with the dove-gray eyes, perfect hands. She comes alive to us, never again to be old and sick, forgetful and aloof. We rock together, the three of us, in some kind of living dream. I wonder what memories my granddaughter will keep of me. I hope I build a bridge for her that is solid and just as beautiful.