Neena and Mammaw: My Two Grandmothers

I was fortunate to have two incredible grandmothers who couldn’t have been more different from each other. My maternal grandmother was named Connie, but her grandchildren called her Neena. She grew up in Arkansas and began painting when she was a little girl, a skill that helped her get through a tumultuous childhood. When she was very young she married my grandfather who soon became an alcoholic and domestic abuser. After many years of suffering, she took her three children, including my mother, to a movie theater, escaping during the intermission to the train station where they boarded a train to Texas. A couple years later, she married Jack Walstad, a petroleum engineer who was kind enough to adopt her three children and they also a son together. Even though he wasn’t blood related, I knew him as my grandfather, Pappaw. He was one of the most loving and generous men I’ve ever known. They moved to Hobbs, New Mexico, and through his job with an oil company, Pappaw often won trips in corporate competitions. He was able to take Neena all over the world, and they never returned home without gifts for all the grandchildren. I remember the anticipation of seeing what they would send my sisters and me from faraway lands. Because of those souvenirs, I always had exciting things for show-and-tell day at school.

My grandparents’ house in New Mexico was the most colorful of any house I had ever seen. Neena painted their furniture and cabinets in bright colors and her beautiful paintings covered the walls of the entire house. She often had visitors over to admire her art, and many ended up buying pieces for themselves. Neena often traveled alone to art schools around the country to learn new techniques for her paintings, using different mediums like oil, acrylic, and watercolor. After the death of her oldest son, my Uncle Bill, as part of her grieving, she took a class in enamel art and made beautiful copper enamel bowls and jewelry. She gave me one of her first enamel pendants that I made into a necklace in her honor.

Neena’s independent nature and fierce desire to learn inspires me every day. It is from her that I’ve had the courage to pursue my dreams, leave a difficult marriage, travel alone, and use art as a tool for getting through difficult times.

Neena also loved to throw dinner parties for friends, and they always had a theme, usually requiring everyone to wear costumes. She spent days making decorations, painting the invitations, and planning the menu. The dish for which she was most famous was chicken and noodles. She rolled the noodles by hand, which impressed everyone since she was probably wearing a silk blouse and high heels through the entire process. Neena’s hostess skills were inherited by my mother, and then passed on to me. And to my delight, my own daughter has a knack for entertaining, a skill most of her friends know little about.

My other grandmother was Mammaw, my father’s mother, and she couldn’t have been more different from Neena. Mammaw was the eleventh child of sixteen, but that’s about all that I know about her youth. I do know that she loved a good joke and was an accomplished tap dancer. And despite the fact that she grew up very poor, she was one of the happiest people I have ever known. She and my grandfather, (who died when I was a baby), raised my dad and aunt in a tiny house in Oklahoma City. Some of my best childhood memories are the sleepovers my sisters and I had at Mammaw’s house. We loved asking her to tap-dance on the wood floor while we tried to mimic her moves. We took turns sleeping with Mammaw in her bed, and she kept us awake with stories about our dad and her own childhood growing up with so many siblings. After our breakfast of Cream of Wheat, we played in her spare bedroom where she had a closet full of dress-up clothes, high heeled shoes, and Barbie dolls. She had a drawer filled with jewelry for us to play with, including long strings of pearls, clip-on earrings, and feather boas. My father’s childhood desk was in that bedroom, and we used it to play school and “office” since Mammaw had a calculator we could use for our pretend transactions. Often, my sisters and I would fight over a pair of shoes or one of the Barbies, and Mammaw would come into the room and say in a high-pitched voice, “Is everybody happy?” She always emphasized the word “happy” with a little more volume. And she always had a smile on her face. How could we not be happy?

Mammaw didn’t cook much, but she was really good at heating up cans of soup or SpaghettiOs. She also made banana instant pudding with vanilla wafers, but the best dessert she made was called Mystery Pie. It doesn’t have a crust and is only called “pie” because it’s made in a pie pan, and it has the texture of a cookie. I think the mystery is that there are Ritz crackers in the mix, but I remember it being the best treat, and even more special because Mammaw made it.

Ironically, both my grandmothers died of lung cancer, two different types. Although they were different in many ways, both women impacted me greatly, each teaching me to enjoy life at its fullest and to remain strong through every circumstance. Their examples and wisdom helped form me into the independent and hard-working woman I strive to be. If I ever become a grandmother, I can only hope to be as wonderful as Neena and Mammaw.