Remembering Past Generations...

“Wouldn’t our parents be pleased that we are together?” says my cousin, Julie with her lovely smile. 

“I remember what fun Mom and Dad had when Virginia and Richard would come to visit.  So much laughter,” continues Julie. “Dad and Richard teased each other incessantly.”

I sit on a black wicker stool at the kitchen counter while Julie cooks dinner and am overwhelmed realizing I am really in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Iowa is the place my family came during my childhood when we took long home leave visits to the States.  Mother’s family lived in Des Moines and Dad’s, lived just two hours East in Cedar Rapids. Fifteen miles outside Cedar Rapids is Cornell College where Mom and Dad met and graduated in 1941. It is where I went to college.  While I am trying to grasp the reality of being back for my 50th Class Reunion at Cornell, I am looking for that little girl and those memories of family so long ago.

Julie and I pick up where we left off which was only a few years ago when we visited her and Cam in Boca Grande, Florida, and when she came to Asheville for a weekend. Being with her in her large Cedar Rapids home furnished with many of her parents antiques and valuable Iowa paintings, I feel the spirit of all the relatives who are now gone.  My memories of Jean and Bob, Virginia and Vincent, Aunt Libby and Uncle Doc and even Grandma and Grandpa Salda are vivid. 

Julie finishes her dinner preparations and says, “Shall we go for a walk before dinner down to Grande Avenue?”

“Oh, yes!”  I exclaim remembering that the entire family lived up and down Grande Ave. from the time my father was a little boy. (Did one have to live on Grande to be family or is this merely coincidence, I’ve always wondered.)  We set out on a brisk walk about a half mile to Grande Ave., a wide but quiet residential avenue with tall oak and maple trees.  Many of the homes are old, all are different and have more land around them than most modern suburban neighborhoods. 

“Here is 2200 Grande Ave. - Mom and Dad’s house,” Julie stops in front of the two story white Colonial with green shutters.  Without the white picket fence in front I wouldn’t have recognized it.  I always remembered it as the American Christmas card house because Aunt Jean and Uncle Bob always sent a photo card taken with the snow and a wreath on the front door.  Memories of addressing letters to Aunt Jean at 2200 come back to me.  She was a wonderful writer and being a letter writer that I was, I loved corresponding with her.

Bob and Jean Vane's home where Julie grew up

A few blocks further we come to  Virginia and Vincent’s home where my cousin Susi whom I talk to often in Houston, grew up.  The house is now painted a dark brown and I am looking for the gray blue one as it used to be. Yes, that’s it, right next to Never Park.   I do recognize the bedroom with the corner windows in the front where I stayed often for weekends when I was a student at Cornell College. 

         Heading  back the other way we come to 2000 Grande Ave, Aunt Libby and Uncle Doc’s brown brick home with the pointed roofs like a gingerbread house.  It looks exactly as it always did. Libby and Lumir were my Czech great aunt and uncle (he was a dentist and we called him “Doc”). They loved us children whom they didn’t see often as we lived in South America.  A bit further down in the more modest end of Grande Ave. is #1619 where Frank and Anna Salda lived (my Czech great-grandparents) who raised my father from a baby when his mother died of tuberculosis. Grandpa Salda, who came from the Old Country and worked as a tailor in Cedar Rapids, was blind by the time I knew him. He died when I was very young.  Grandma Salda lived a few years longer but I was always afraid of her perhaps because as a little girl she seemed very ancient to me.

Aunt Libby and Uncle Doc's home - 2000 Grande Ave.

Grandma and Grandpa Salda's home - 1619 Grande Ave

House where my father grew up.

Julie drives me to the Czech cemetery the following morning, a place I have never been.  She and Susi did preliminary research earlier in the summer and mapped out where some of the family tombstones from long ago are. The cemetery is large as there were many Czech immigrants who settled in Cedar Rapids.   As I gaze out across the upright marble tombstone I see a large one, clearly visible from a distance with the name SAMPSON (my maiden name).  No one ever told me about this or took me here.  On the back side of the same tombstone is the name SALDA. It is here that the grandmother, Tillie, whom I never knew because she died at 29 , is buried, along with her sister, Nina, who also died young from the same disease.  Both left babies to be raised by others - my father was one. Grandma and Grandpa Salda are here as well.

When I lam with Julie I see her mother’s big smile which radiates a special warmth.   We have each often been told “you look just like your mother”.  And we do.  What I am aware of this visit is how we are not like our mothers but daughters of a much different generation than theirs was..  We are independent and talk more openly about family and relationships and agree that many things in our childhood were not spoken of.  Julie tells me of a little girl, a sister, who lived and died before Julie was born and was never spoken of. Julie and I are alike in that our focus is on exercise, healthy eating and living , continuing to learn, and staying connected any way we know how with our grandchildren.

“I just bought a book on football,” Julie tells me.

“What for?” I ask.

“So I can understand what I’m watching when I go see Jack, my grandson, play next week,” she says.

It is such a comfort to be with someone who has known me all my life. I know Julie feels the same about me.  We talk of how we miss our mothers, yet we don’t think of ourselves as “old ladies” and will not be defined at this age in the same way our mothers and grandmothers were. 

On my way back to Asheville from our stay in Cedar Rapids I wish more than anything I could call up Mother and tell her all about the visit.  She, more than anyone, would loved to have known Julie and I were together for a weekend catching up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa!