She wasn’t the kind of woman you gave nicknames to or a comfortable, soft bosom kids cried out for in the night. Severe lines aged and marred her chronically unhappy face. Pulling tight back into a bun, silver hair only added to the sharp edges.
She kept a huge garden—the kind that feels like security and safety after suffering poverty and want. The rich Willamette Valley soil offered up produce that filled endless jars of unmarked, undated green beans lining the walls of a lean-to pantry behind the kitchen. Tucked into the shelves were all the hoarded glass jars, grocery bags, and margarine tubs.
Skin as thin as tissue paper covered with age marks, crafted polyester crazy quilts, and made beans with a hambone on the white electric stove. Her dated plastic glasses perched on her nose as she diligently reinforced every seam on her thrifted dress.
Under the framed family photos hanging on the wall, we kids ate meals on a vinyl-covered kitchen table, heckling each other, daring to complain if something smelled “weird”. Getting quiet when sharply reacted with a “shut-up,” hissed with a clenched jaw. “Ungrateful kids”, mumbled over yellow cake.
Grandma was not a happy woman. She wasn’t a gentle woman. She was a hard worker. She was a woman who didn’t go up front but settled in the back row. She wasn’t rich or well-educated or any of those things that resonate as success to us today. But she had a home. A family. Plenty of food and a car that ran. Simple enough luxuries she held onto with a tenacity that echoed through the years of children, loss, societal change, and apostolic religious fervor.
He was a tall, jolly man who sat in his blue recliner with one leg thrown over the arm, sparkling eyes behind glasses, and one finger missing the bit just past the third joint. Blue cotton work pants and a chambray button-up shirt were his daily uniform unless it was the polyester suit, white shirt, and tie for church. “Over-hauls”, if he was working outside.
“Get over here, girl!” he’d say as he grabbed and hugged me. Larger than life, he regaled us with stories of hunting, fishing, and playing the fiddle at barn dances in Oklahoma. The same dances where he met 20-something-year-old Merle Avo and married her up. Just like that. Love and marriage, even in the Great Depression, in the haze of the Dust Bowl.
But there wasn’t enough in the lower Midwest to support their growing family, so Lee Olin went off to Oregon to his sister and to find work. To make something. To send for the family he’d left in a tent, picking cotton with sharecroppers. But time dragged on, and Merle Avo couldn’t stay in Oklahoma any longer. Her family was there, her mother doing what she could to help, but there were three little ones and mouths to feed.
And Lee Olin was silent. No contact. She had a town and the number of her sister-in-law. She had a decision to make. It wouldn’t have been easy, in those days, to just let him go. Single mothers didn’t have luxuries like government support, and a woman with children wasn’t something that many men were willing to take on. My mom, Eva Marie, told me stories of picking cotton in the fields when she was three. “Just put the dirt clod in, Eva. They won’t look too closely at your bag.”
They got paid by the weight of whatever they gleaned, and modern thoughts like child-labor laws hadn’t been translated to Okie yet. Childcare only existed for those who could afford it. And Merle Avo couldn’t. So, with three children under 5, she worked the fields. Ate the beans. Held on to the hope that Lee Olin would either send for her or return.
Finally, she reached a place where choices crumbled to stark realities, so she packed up what little she had, sold all her furniture to her mother, and purchased 4 bus tickets and a bag of oranges. The Davenports were going to Oregon.
In those days, it took about a week to go, by bus, to Oregon from Oklahoma. The route was Oklahoma to Los Angeles, California, and then up the interstate to Oregon. A week. With three small children, no help, a bag of oranges, and the smallest hope that there would be a place for her, some semblance of security, a version of a future that equaled safety when she got there. And she faced it. Juggling children, luggage, heartache…
I can only imagine what the emerald green of the Willamette Valley looked like to her tired, dusty soul as they pulled into the bus station. With a nickel left, her children tucked into the hotel room a kind gentleman had gotten for them for the one night, she took stock of the world she was in and placed a short phone call to Lee Olin’s sister.
And he showed up.
The reunited family lived on a mink farm then he worked at the cannery. Four more children were born. One lost to a horrific tragedy. Lee Olin built a house that we are pretty sure never met a level or a straight line, and that’s where they lived, that’s where he died.
I don’t know what Merle Avo found when she came to Salem. I don’t know what Lee Olin did. I know his sister never forgave him, and I am pretty sure his wife didn’t either. Whatever it was that he did is nearly obscured by the reality of so many things that he didn’t do.
I don’t know how they managed to continue after the loss of a child. A loss that their pastor blamed on their selfish observance of Christmas. A loss that terrified them so badly, it wasn’t until 2-3 years before Grandma passed that she and her children exchanged simple gifts and reconciled the idea that December 25th wasn’t only a harbinger of death and loss.
It was June 1997. My cousin and I worked quietly in Grandma’s kitchen making blackberry jam. I was 5 months pregnant with my first son, Isaac. One of the few times I felt like Grandma smiled at me was when she reminded me that Isaac was her father’s name. Isaac Armstrong. She took a great deal of pride in our son being his namesake. She was so proud that I didn’t have the heart to tell her that we’d had no idea when we chose the name.
On that afternoon, we’d been keeping vigil over Grandpa. Bone cancer. Terminal. He lay in the nook where the TV used to be in a hospital bed, all utility and institution. My mom stayed close to Grandma, and friends drizzled in and out the front door.
And then… Just like that… He was gone. Merle Avo was alone again. And somehow? Over the next 7 years, as she moved from child to child, home to home, she was softer. She sang more. She complained less. Frown lines lightened. She wore the blue flowered dress with the lace collar, soft silver hair in a curly updo.
She giggled over the funny things my toddler sons would say and delighted in having her hair fixed by her daughter and granddaughter. After her stroke, she struggled with stability and yet would be found clapping softly to worship music when it played.
There weren’t many easy things about Merle Avo, but there was a grit and tenacity that carried her beyond the joviality of a family that nearly fractured more than once and a life lived in the spectre of loss and not enough. She wasn’t comfortable.
But she was the one who stayed. Who held tightly to the faith she had, the Bible she knew. No matter what.
She wasn’t a woman you gave nicknames to or the soft bosom kids cried out for in the night. But she was the woman who wrote long letters to a daughter who traveled the world and raised children in parsonages and a small farm. She was the woman who remembered birthdays and always made sure there was food on the stove and clean quilts in the upstairs bedrooms.
She was the one who didn’t captivate the room. Not like Lee Olin. She was the one who stayed. Who never left.
Beautiful telling of your history. It would be interesting to see if we could ‘dig’ up more info on Lee Olin…what a story. Thank you for sharing. We’ll have to talk more about this 😉