Spoken from the Heart Read Free

Midland was a dry county back then, so people simply drove out along the highway to the next county to buy their alcohol. When Grandma Welch came to visit, Daddy would still drink, but out of deference to his mother, he poured his bourbon into a Coca-Cola bottle.
    When I was little, we drove to Lubbock every other weekend to visit my grandmother so that Daddy could check on her, make sure her house was tended to and her bills were paid. She came to our house for Thanksgiving and Christmas. My parents would go up and get her, and she would bring a bag of her pickled peaches that she put up each summer in heavy glass jars. Each Christmas she would make her famous coconut cake. Santa would leave a big, fresh coconut in my stocking, and then Daddy, with great ceremony, would crack the coconut with a hammer. My grandmother carefully drained the clear, sweet milk and grated the coconut meat with a hard box grater, which if you weren't careful, would cut your fingers raw. Then she sprinkled the tender curls over the frosting like a fine, white snow. She would spend Christmas Day making the cake for Christmas dinner. I'm not sure if she had a recipe or if she merely mixed the proportions in her mind, but every bite was delicious.
    The Christmas after I turned eight, she carefully wrapped two pieces of jewelry, a pretty gold bracelet and a gold pin that my grandfather had given her, and put them under the Christmas tree for me. She sent my little cousin Mary Mark two other pieces of jewelry, including her opal ring. Those were the only four pieces of jewelry she owned. She must have known that this was going to be her last Christmas. She died right after that. My mother was with her. When Grandma Welch was sick and needed tending, it was my mother who drove to Lubbock to look after her. I was asleep in my parents' bed when the phone rang deep in the night. Daddy woke me and said simply, "Your grandmother died." That was all. My grandmother, his mother, was eighty-four.
    Afterward, Mother discovered that Grandma Welch had taken her few nice things--a couple of cut glass vases, platters, a sugar bowl--and had carefully marked each possession with a strip of masking tape on the bottom, writing "Jenna" or "Catherine," and dividing what little she had between her two daughters-in-law.
    My parents were married in a chapel at Fort Bliss in January of 1944, right before Daddy was to be shipped off to Europe. He wore his Army dress uniform. Mother followed him briefly to his next base, in Alexandria, Louisiana, but within a week my father was sent east. A hasty good-bye and he was gone. Whirlwind romances with GIs were common back then, but this wedding was no whim for my mother and certainly not for my father. One of his first letters to his new bride before he boarded the ship for England was a detailed accounting of their finances--he began by telling her that he didn't want her to be worried about money and proceeded to explain how much they had if Jenna ever needed to turn in their war bonds for cash.
    With nothing to do except wait, Mother went back to El Paso and the Popular Dry Goods advertising department, got a roommate, and hung on every letter. One weekend, Mother and another of her married friends took turns snapping photos of each other immersed in fluffy bubble baths inside an old-fashioned claw-foot tub, flashing Kewpie doll smiles, and mailed the pictures over to their husbands. Daddy carried Mother's photo across northern Europe. He wrote to her from France, from Belgium, from Aachen, the ancient medieval town on the German border where Emperor Charlemagne once lived. It was the first German city to be captured by the Americans. His battalion, the 555th, was an antiaircraft battalion. My dad was a master gunner. His primary mission was to keep the unit's gun batteries in working order and to train new gunners, who arrived wide-eyed and green. He drew maps for the soldiers, and when U.S. forces entered Germany's fourth largest