written by MaryJan Munger, these memories conjure up sights, sounds, and smells. Even if we didn't know Hannah, we feel like we did!
Today is the birthday of my dear dear grandmother Hannah Hansen Gay. She would have been 103 years old.
She grew up in "Gravelbed" just outside of Monroe, Utah, where she sang songs with her sisters and climbed up in a tree with a book to escape dishes. When she was grown she married and moved over the hill to Joseph, Utah, and had two sons (my dad and uncle Larry) and one daughter (named for her husband and herself: Dee + Hannah= Deanna) who was born too soon and died after only a few days. Everyone who knew her seemed to feel she had a particular love for and delight in them individually. I think she probably did.
She played the ukulele and sang songs like "When It's Springtime in the Rockies" (I remember her teaching me the words while driving up the mountain, me wedged between her and Grandpa in the old blue Ford pick-up on a rainy June day on the way to go camping at Fish Lake) and "Go To Sleep, My Little Buckaroo" (my dearest memory of this: her lullaby as I snuggled down, in my dad's old army green canvas sleeping bag with the red flannel cowboy lining, out on the grass by the back porch, looking up into the milky light of those western stars shining down on me). She also led the music at church and because it was my favorite song always scheduled "Come Come Ye Saints" (#13 in those days) when I came to visit -- her face twinkling down at me as she waved her arms to pull the singing from the congregation.
She was the town postmistress and so visiting at her house was always punctuated by the sharp *ting* of the silver bell and then neighbors' voices as they came to collect their mail from cunning little golden boxes with adorable curly handles and fancy numbering in the little office built just off her kitchen. We children weren't allowed on the other side of the gate but we could watch her sort the mail and hear the neighbors' gossip. In the evenings we'd help her hoist down the flag and fold it into a tight triangle of beautiful starry blue which she would then lay on the impressive looking brass scale. Our parents (but never Grandma herself) scolded us for "mailing" pinecones in the big blue mailbox out by the road.
The only cross words I ever heard from her were an impatient "Hell's bells, Dee!" to my Grandpa once in a while, which always made us giggle, because she was so angelic in every other way you couldn't take it as actual cussing. She read Little Golden Books to us in a rushed breathless voice, licking her fingers to turn the pages, all of us grandkids piled up in her lap. Her bookcase was filled with actual books a person could read for fun -- Zane Grey westerns and romance novels about dashing young women who found adventure everywhere from the American West to misty, mysterious England to Imperial China. She let us "experiment" with every ingredient in her kitchen -- I made some memorably awful dishes with broccoli and mayonnaise, peaches and Worcestershire sauce. More successfully we made crust cookies sprinkled with sugar when she made her pies, her quick clever fingers pinching scallops all around the pie-pan. She taught us how to play cards mercilessly -- Bloody Smash was our favorite -- as well as how to embroider flowers and birds and smiling self-portraits to decorate our pillowcases and how to crochet blankets for our dolls. And there were always cookies or cake and Neapolitan ice cream or Shasta black cherry soda to guzzle out on the front porch while we listened to the whine and roar of semis barreling past down state route 89 or frozen cherries in little baggies that she would let us take outside so we could spit the pits in the grass.
Her house was tall, steep-roofed, and pale green with a flagpole and two giant pine trees filled with singing birds. Baby birds would sometimes fall from their nests and we would try to save them, filling their little gullets with tiny translucent red berries from Grandma's bird bush (I think it was a viburnum). Grandma Hannah's garden was iris and buttercup, yellow columbine, pink peonies, snowball bush, snapdragon, and petunias. Grandpa Dee's garden was tomatoes, potatoes, squash, cucumbers that Grandma made into unequalled bread & butter pickles, and the peas and beans Grandma would shell or snap it seems every summer morning. Her meals were the height of deliciousness, love made into a casserole or cake or jello salad. Her hugs were all-encompassing, her sweet floury scent all-embracing, her soft smiling cheek still a memory against my own. Oh, how much I still miss her!
When I see her again, will she say like she always did, "Why, Dee, look who's here. It's the kids! I'm just tickled pink!" and gather me up in her arms? I still see her in my mind's eye, standing on her front lawn waving for as long as I look back out of the car window as we drive away.
Note: This memory was originally shared on Facebook Aug. 25, 2018. The tribute was titled: Happy happy birthday, Grandma Hannah dear
💗❤🧡💛💚💙💜💗
