Mabel is an immovable character on Islandshire. She’s one of those “if the house caught on fire who would you grab” dolls. Mabel is entirely based on my great-grandmother (1897-1982). While I never actually met her, my Mother has kept her alive with stories and her personal items that are scattered throughout our house. She was a real character in her time, and I wish I’d had an old-fashioned grandmother like that. Since I don’t, though, we have MABEL! And Gramma just LOVED a good mystery or western. She devoured books and scheduled her later life around the TV time slots. Erle Stanley Gardner was her author of choice, and she received one in the mail every month (brown paper wrapper, of course). But she loved Agatha Christie and lots of other mystery writers, too. She read a lot of Zane Grey and pulp-fiction westerns. Perry Mason, Gunsmoke and Bonanza were her favorite TV shows. (She was a TV baseball fanatic, too, but that really doesn’t fit into a mystery or western genre, does it?) Gertie (the rarely seen receptionist in the show) was her favorite Perry Mason character. When it came to Bonanza, though, she was nuts about Little Joe and his paint horse. Guess I’ll have to make our Mabel a Western book next . . .
Wonderful. I never thought to make my Gran an AG. Just too long ago and far away. Although she lived with us and was a co homemaker with my mother, her generation was not like any of the AGs.
I’ll tell you a secret. Not one of our dolls has any resemblance to what AG meant them to be (heaven forbid). All of our dolls are based on real people, some we’ve known, some we just know of. Nearly all of our dolls (all 40+ have names and characters) are modern girls or boys who have a long pedigree of ancestors and many old “family stories” that they like to talk about and remember. Like our own, their “houses” are filled with lovely “old things” that remind them of the people who came before them. Would you share some stories with us of your Gran? If you don’t, no one will. And many of our younger readers might be surprised to learn that people have never really been different inside, no matter how many hundreds of years have passed. They just wore different clothes and hairstyles. Fundamentally, there is “nothing new under the sun” about people. And your Gran would be no exception. She was just someone who lived in a different time. She had good times and bad times. Liked certain dresses better than others. Had favorite recipes and secrets to keep. Loved or hated wearing hats. And had more time for things that mattered, because her life wasn’t overrun by all the timesavers we have now. There, now. How’s that for a build-up? Gran would probably get a kick out of thinking she was still being remembered. And, I for one, would love to hear stories about her. At least a name and years? Maybe she knew my Mabel . . .
I had a lovely old-fashioned grandmother. She was born in 1888 and died. like your great-grandmother, in 1982. She wasn’t much of a reader but she was a great worker. She said, “I canned 40 quarts…” She didn’t recall what she canned 40 quarts of — my guess is that they brought the fruits and vegetables in from the farm and she just kept canning. She was not quite 5′ tall but very strong — she twisted necks off chickens, and in her canning days, sometimes twisted the tops on jars so tightly that the jar broke. Mom says she was a natural cook and could make anything taste good, though she had little to work with. She was a great story-teller, making up stories about mice living in the fields and how they stayed warm in winter. She danced all her life, and as a young woman, was a great rider, much admired by the Apaches, who called her “the little girl who rides like the wind.”
Her mother was born to wander and had been addicted to morphine by the local doctor (not apparently uncommon after the Civil War, when it was the new miracle drug “with no side effects.”) My grandmother, Lizzie, was the oldest daughter. When the youngest of her 10 siblings was born, Lizzie was left with the kids and the housework while Susan, her mother, went to take “the cure.” She used to scream for morphine when she was sick but never relapsed. They moved when Susan got the urge to see more country — Kentucky to Oklahoma (at which point Grandma’s brother Will returned to Kentucky for a horse worthy of Lizzie, who named her new horse Fancy) to Missouri (where Lizzie married) to Texas (where Will married and stayed) to Colorado. Susan died in Colorado, so this is where the family remained, though a lot of Kentucky stayed in my grandmother. “He ain’t got no raisins,” she said of people without manners, and once she said, “Oh, he wouldn’t know beans if he had his haid in the sack.”
She especially loved her father and said, “My father…my father was the best man that ever lived.” My mother said she never found anyone who had known him who disagreed. When Lizzie married, Susan cried, because “Lizzie, you raised one family, and now you’re going to raise another.” She had 5 children, raised 4, and lived to hold a great grandchild.
During her last years, she lived on the upper level of a 2 story house, and in the morning the squirrels would come to the window for the cornbread or biscuits she’d been making every morning since she was a girl already taking care of her family.
What a precious story! Thank you SO much for sharing this! You resemble her, by the way, because you must be a natural-born storyteller! Superb!