Second I Essay Draft (I hate the Title!)

Strength and Love

My grandmother once punched a neighborhood boy and knocked him from our front porch into the street because he was saying raunchy things to my aunt. Four years later that same boy was in the army and he was trying to enter army intelligence. Two men in full uniform came knocking on the front door of the big old house and asked my grandmother, “Would you trust David DeAmore with the secrets of our nation?”

My grandmother’s answer is what got him the job, because they knew she wasn’t lying. She looked that soldier in the eye, her back as straight as his military posture, and said confidently “Absolutely, but I wouldn’t trust him with my daughters.”


I wasn’t alive when that happened, but I’ve been told it so many times that I started believing that I can remember it. I can almost see the shocked look on David DeAmore’s face as he stood in the middle of Conover street, halfway between his family’s house and mine, looking at my grandmother with a bruise starting to darken on his cheek. Though she died when I was younger, I get the feeling that I did get to know the woman from stories like this. Barbara Krieg was not someone that you messed with, ever.

Sometimes I wonder if the woman that was willing to clock a boy half her age in the jaw was the same woman I remember from the misty fog of youthful recollection. The memories I have of my grandmother are of a thin, white haired woman who walked with a slight limp because of the missing part of her foot from diabetes. She smelled of musk perfume and the hypoallergenic fabric softener we all used. Her arms were thin but strong whenever she picked me up or hugged me. I never knew she was sick.

She was my advocate and protector, the woman who bought me dolls and clothes and hugged me when I was upset. She sang to me when I was little, that song “You are my Sunshine” as she hugged me every time the neighborhood kids kicked me in the shins at preschool. It wasn’t until I was much older that my aunt Barbara told me just how much she cared for me, the child of her failure daughter.


In 1987, my grandmother made her eldest daughter promise something. My aunt Barbara was sitting with her outside our family home, in the large backyard full of fruit trees. Spring had passed and I can imagine the way the yard must have looked. The cherries were starting to ripen on the tree in the back of the yard. Green apples hung heavily on another tree. The yard wouldn’t have been quite as overgrown and wild as it was a few years later, when I would play in the tall grass, but it would be getting there.

I had just been born early that morning, and my mother had not told a soul she was pregnant until that day. Grandma and Aunt Barbara were taking a break from rushing to find all the basics an infant would need. They sat in silence for a while, and then my grandmother spoke, “Barbara, you have to promise me something, promise me that that little girl will have a place to live. Peggy can’t do it herself and I might not be around much longer.”

That promise made sure that me and my mother would have a place to live for ten years after my grandmother’s death when I was four. I lived in the family home, an old brown two-story house surrounded by more modern cottage type rental homes. There were memories in every corner of the house, which my mother hadn’t changed a bit since my grandmother lived there. All the same pictures hung on the wall, and the couches still had the same awful 1970s orange upholstery. Scratched onto one of the doorframes was a height chart for all eight of my grandmother’s children and the beginnings of one for myself. By the time I was eight, I was as tall as my mother was at thirteen. Pictures of my grandfather, whom I’d never met since he died of cancer three years before I was born, were up on the walls. I have his blue eyes. Hidden throughout the house were the remnants of family history.

Once when I was exploring my house on a rainy day, something I would do often because there were always little surprises in the closets, I found my grandmother’s jewelry box. In that box I found a beautiful rosary, the beads worn from rubbing. I was amazed at how beautiful it was. There weren’t any other religious icons in the house, and even the little gold cross I wore was a gift from someone rather than something I’d been taught to believe in. I felt like I shouldn’t have even been holding that little rosary, fearing that perhaps it wasn’t allowed. I didn’t know until later why Grandma had that rosary and no other religious items.


Grandma apparently was once a devout Catholic. She would go to church every Sunday, dressed up in her nicest dress with her head covered modestly with a little pillbox hat. There was bible study every Wednesday, and she would attend those too. Her faith was something that was just part of who she was for a long time, like it was with most of the other branches of my family. Then came the difficult pregnancies.
She was a small woman, not particularly built for childbearing, unlike her children would be later, as they all had the sturdier build of her husband, and her multiple pregnancies were starting to take their toll. By her fifth child, the gestational diabetes that my grandmother had suffered simply stuck around as type 2. Now, after having her seventh child, my Aunt Mickey, Grandma didn’t want to have anymore. She went to her priest and told him that she was thinking about using birth control. The priest responded in the typical way, implying that Grandma would be disobeying the will of the Lord.

“I was fruitful! I multiplied! I’ve got kids everywhere in my house and I don’t even remember which ones aren’t mine anymore,” she told the priest, “and if that’s not good enough for God then I don’t know what else he wants.”

A few months later, my grandmother found out she was pregnant with my aunt Annie and she stopped going to church.

In a different closet, I found a picture of Grandma sitting at a table surrounded by the rest of my family. A baby boy was sitting in her lap, clapping with her help as my aunt Loretta brought out a big cake. In the corner of the picture a little girl with curly blond hair sulked, staring down the little boy with a glare that could cut diamonds. I don’t remember why I hated my little cousin so much, maybe because the little boy was taking my place as the one that Grandma would spoil. Whatever the reason was, it was lost in the events that followed. That picture was from the night Grandma died.


She had been in the hospital earlier that day, and still smelled a little like medicine and sickness, a distinctive hospital odor. She told the doctor that she was fine and that she knew her sugar was a little high, but she had somewhere she needed to be. My mother picked her up from the hospital and we drove as a family with my Aunt Annie, who was home from college just for this occasion, to my cousin’s first birthday party. I didn’t care much for Richard, and was actually frightened of his father’s family, so different from us. I thought that Richard smelled and told my mother that confidently. The adults in the car just laughed and said that that was just how babies smelled.

We helped Grandma up the stairs when we got to my aunt’s house. Her house was almost as old as the one I lived in, but it had hard wood floors that creaked with every step. My cousin Crissy was sitting in a chair, rocking back and forth and not responding to anyone, her blind, unseeing eyes crossing as she continued to rock and occasionally say a gibberish phrase. She tolerated Grandma’s hug for longer than she let anyone else touch her. Richard stumble-walked towards us with his hands held firmly in my uncle Ray’s. The whole room smelled like food and people. I wanted to go immediately.


I spent the night watching Grandma play with Richard and smiling from a spot on the couch next to my aunt Annie, who never liked crowds and had a lot of studying to do. I fell asleep on the car ride back, so I didn’t hear my Grandma complaining about her arm, and my mother thought nothing of it. Grandma helped Mom carry me up to bed and then went to bed herself.

That night she passed away, peacefully in her sleep.


I’ve always wondered if Grandma knew that Richard’s party would be the last time she’d see her whole family, that Richard would be the last of her grandchildren that she’d see. She was so adamant about going, even though she was sick. Her time of death is actually the next day, and my mother always says, with tears in her eyes the way there always are when she talks about grandma, that she didn’t want Richard’s birthday to be tainted like that, so she held on. I don’t know if that’s exactly what it is, but that’s what my family likes to believe.

I was fourteen, and my mother was at her night job, and anyway I hadn’t seen her in a few days anyway. I sat up awake, screaming, my voice hoarse like I’d been screaming in my sleep too. My body was covered in sweat and I looked around the room, the floor covered in garbage that my mother wouldn’t let me throw out. I saw a rat the size of a cat running across the floor away from the bed and shivered. The side of the bed dipped down and I heard something I hadn’t heard in ten years.

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray. You’ll never know dear, how much I love you. Please don’t take my sunshine away.”
Nothing was there, but somehow I felt safer than I had in years.