We drove down from Midland to Coloma on Thursday after going to Great Aunt Wil's yoga class for senior citizens and having lunch with them. (Yoga for old people is actually pretty cool b/c it keeps them limber and helps their balance-- they do the moves with help from chairs!) Coloma is where G'ma grew up and where one of her sisters still lives, so we're staying with my Great Aunt Verlo.
It's a small town surrounded by small towns-- there's one Rite Aid and one grocery store and I think I've seen one, maybe two, gas stations. The speed limit doesn't go above 45 anywhere and there are lots of fields and crops (peaches, apples, grapes) everywhere.
My great grandparents donated their house to the county historical society so now it's part of a museum that was built behind the original house. Verlo lives next door so yesterday she let us in and we got to wander through the old house on our own taking our time to see what we wanted to. This is the first time I've been here since my great grandparents passed away (9 years ago) and it was sort of weird going in their house without them being there.
We went to an estate sale in the house of one of G'ma's cousins and I bought a 1915 edition of Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol and some old versions of fairy tales by the Brother's Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson, as well as a couple of old reading primers copywrite date: 1907. Pretty cool for a nerdy English teacher :) I also got a pretty crystal bowl for $7.50 just like one in G'ma's collection of dishes.
I've visited a couple of G'ma's cousins and one of her oldest/closest friends, which has been alternatingly interesting and really boring! This morning we went to breakfast with G'ma's neice (my second cousnin) and her new husband. We also went to a "Lest We Forget" Celebration in Benton Harbor where they remembered veterans of WWII. They had camp set ups and old army trucks and dressed up people everywhere. G'ma told me about metal drives they did to gather metal to make stuff for WWII.
No comments:
Post a Comment