The month of March is said to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb, referring, of course, to weather conditions. March is also Women’s History Month, which is fitting since we have come in with a roar since the beginning of the Women’s Movement. My personal history involves one woman who both roared like a lionesses and was gentle as a lamb.
My maternal grandmother was born Lula Deline, of Scottish-Irish-French heritage, at the turn of the last century. She lived much of her life in Spokane, Wash., where she met and married my Italian grandfather, Albert Presta.
Grandma had an inner strength that often revealed itself in unusual ways. She and her three daughters, one being my mother, all once worked for Northwest Airlines at Spokane Airport. The girls were waitresses in the airport diner, where Grandma worked as a cook and baker. This was back in the day when planes made several stops to refuel and passengers disembarked to get a meal.
One fateful day Mom had to fetch Grandma with the news that their home, a farmhouse, had caught fire. Mom told me it was the only time she ever saw her mother cry, and then only briefly. Then Grandma said, “Well, let’s go and see what’s left.”
It wasn’t much, according to Mom and my two aunts. Grandma arrived to see the house collapse in on itself. She then noticed items that neighbors had managed to save from the flames. She later marveled how people had actually taken time to put spice bottles in a drawer and save that. They saved old dishcloths, flour sacks, and even the kitchen rug. Apparently, the fire had not started in the kitchen!
Her children, husband, and neighbors watched amazed as Grandma began hurling things back into the fire exclaiming, “Why, this should have been thrown out long ago! Who wants this old thing?” Such was her way of coping with tragedies, and she had more than her share.
My earliest memories are of Grandma driving me to school when I was in first grade. She had learned to drive farm trucks and tractors, but road driving in an automobile was a skill she acquired later in life. She was quite a hellion on the road, and I recall many mornings as she raced the daily milk train to the intersection, where she barreled across the tracks just ahead of the cowcatcher as the engineer gave himself a cardiac infarct blowing the whistle at her. I still get palpitations thinking about it.
Years later, I drove her around Phoenix, Ariz., during one of her visits. She hated red lights. As we approached an intersection where the light turned yellow, without warning she pushed down on my gas-pedal foot exhorting me to “Make the light!” I nearly saw a light of a different kind as my life passed before me while I regained control of my car. Ah, good times!
My three cousins and two brothers had their own experiences with this lioness of a grandmother. They used to spend summers at our grandparents’ dairy farm in Spokane. Grandma loved to go to the cattle shows. She had somehow managed to have the back seat removed from her 1960s Chevy Impala and would cram all five boys in the back. The front seat was reserved, of course, for her capacious purse. This was during a time that predated seat belts, booster seats, and “Child On Board” placards.
“Grandma, you aren’t buying anything, right?” they’d plead. “No, I’m just going to look,” she’d promise. She invariably ended up buying one or two calves for the dairy herd. These little guys were bundled in burlap sacks and she’d load them up in back with the boys and haul ass home.
According to my brother Mike, the calves would panic and poop in the bags. The boys would beg to roll the windows down. On one such occasion a calf broke loose and tried to scramble out the back window. “Grandma!” the boys shouted. “Stop the car, the calf is getting out!” Nonplussed, she sped up and yelled, “Just hold on to the damned thing!” Somehow, they always made it home in one big, smelly heap, which she promptly hosed down with the garden hose—boys, calves, and car.
Grandma’s favorite pastime, though, was horse racing. She loved to sip a cold beer in the grandstands, racing form in hand, at Playfair Race Course in Spokane. Visits to Phoenix found her at Turf Paradise, and trips to see family in California included afternoons at Santa Anita or Hollywood Race Tracks. I loved sitting with her in the grandstands, cheering our horses to the finish as she thumped my back with one hand and pounded the table with the other, splashing nearby spectators and me with Rainier beer. She never drank to excess, mind you—and talk about horse sense; this woman could sure pick a winner!
My grandma, Lula Deline Presta, had eyes that could see 360 degrees at once, ears that could hear the slightest whimper, and hands that were large and strong, and smelled of sage, cinnamon, and vanilla, and felt soft against my face. She looked lovely in pale yellow pantsuits and wore Estee Lauder Youth Dew. She loved history, music, and art, about which she knew only what she read or saw in books.
In her later years, she traveled a bit, and I was not at all surprised to get a postcard from the Philippines showing a limbo dancer coming out of the photo crotch first! “I sure am having a good time,” she wrote. I’ll bet she sure did!
Ariel Waterman aspires to be just like her grandma. Send racing forms and any tips on a horse via her editor, Ryan Miller, at rmiller@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 8-15, 2012.