My Grandma

I can’t recall my first memory of my Grandma Ogilvie. She was just always there. She visited when I was born…and again when Katey was born…and again a year or two later. I have pictures to prove it – not memories. My memories kick in when I was 5 and we moved to Tennessee. Then Grandma really was there.

Grandma lives in the house built into a hill. I’ve always thought it was a neat house, the kind with lots of ways in and a wonderfully long drive around it to ride bikes on and plenty of yard to play in. I have TONS of memories of that house – lots of family gatherings, Easter egg hunts, riding bikes, Christmases, fun with my cousins. A lot of its furnishings are familiar, its smell brings back all sorts of fun and even the old toys I played with are still about somewhere. It’s Grandma’s house – the kind every kid should have a memory of.

Grandma herself…well, a think “formidable” might be a good word to describe Grandma Ogilvie. That word literally means, “inspiring fear or respect through being impressively large, powerful, intense or capable.” In terms of Grandma it means, “inspiring respect through being impressively capable”. At least, to me.

My grandma, Betty Ann, was born June 6, 1932 to Felix Bert George (known as “Bert”) and his wife Annie Maple Lucille Hayes (known by any of those names or “Sally” by her grandkids). They had three children: Lucille, Macklin (known as “Mack”) and my grandma. Lucille died as an infant, leaving my grandma with her big brother Mack, who was nearly five years her senior. Her father was a sharecropper and they were a poor, farming family. I would learn later that my grandma begrudged her “poverty” all her life, but she had many things to be grateful for.

I can imagine my grandmother was a dreamer, in her own no-nonsense way. I think she hoped for a good education, and opportunities, and a good life. How she met my grandfather, I actually don’t know. Except that Lewisburg is a small town, it’s hard to imagine them in the same “circles”. For when they married in 1951, Grandma was 18 years of age. My grandfather, William Harris Ogilvie, Jr. was 33.

Over the next four years, they would have three children: Will, Pat (my mom) and George. Aunt Lynn arrived nine years later. My grandfather built Grandma the house in the hill. In 1958, she started her first Kindergarten in the basement. (My parents would meet in that same Kindergarten the following year.) And for the next 50+ years, my grandmother would be a part of nearly every child’s life in the town of Lewisburg, Tennessee.

For after closing her Kindergarten, Grandma went on to run the daycare in her local Methodist church. In 1987, she would open her own daycare. Over the next couple of decades, she would retire from that daycare…and then return to it. When she finally made her retirement “official” she still worked: as a teacher’s aide at the local elementary school. There are very few children – or adults – in Lewisburg who do not know Mrs. Betty Ann Ogilvie. And those probably live under a rock…

It seems that nothing has ever knocked my grandmother down. My grandfather died in 1974, leaving her with three children in college and a ten-year-old to raise on her own. I know it was hard. Later she would remarry, but it was a very, well…unique marriage that would end when I was about eleven or twelve. That was probably hard, too, in it’s own way. Still, Grandma marched on.

Which, I think, is what inspires fear and respect in my soul. Nothing ever seems to knock my grandma down. She is a woman you might not always agree with, but she is a woman you will admire and respect. In all honesty, I haven’t always agreed with her. And I’m not sure I’ve ever truly pleased her. Our relationship has been difficult to non-existent. For even though I might be the first grandchild, I am not one of the favored ones. Simply put, I am not “formidable”.

But, then, neither is Grandma. The past six months of her life have been up and down. We all thought the cancer in her body had been removed, but it seems it was not. Last week she was released from the hospital and put on hospice care. Any day now, I expect to get that final call…

It’s funny. I haven’t seen my grandmother for years. I haven’t talked to my grandmother for years. But I can’t tell you how many times I have simply broken down and cried this past week. Cried that Emry will not meet her. That I will have to teach Emry all those funny little songs Grandma would plop down at the piano and play. (She can’t read music; she plays by ear.) That I won’t have the opportunity to spend time (however awkward) with her again. For I know that in her own way, she loved me. And I love her.

Grandma and me - 1987