Joyce Zeiss

I wish I had known Grandma Burns when she was a little girl and played with the doll that now hangs in a shadow box on my bedroom wall. Instead, I remember her as a resilient pioneer woman who arrived in the U.S. from England in 1883 at the age of two. She and my grandfather homesteaded in southern Idaho in the early 1900’s. Blind from a cornea disease at fifty, she carried on, followed a wire clothesline out to her chicken coop, crossed the irrigation ditch on a narrow board, scattered feed and collected eggs from her cackling hens. She prepared meals on a gas stove and never burned the house down. When our family visited in the summer, my brother and I loved to sneak out to the kitchen to steal a cookie from the cookie jar. “Who’s out there?” she’d call. We’d scurry away. No fooling Grandma.

When we’d leave to drive back to Ohio, she would dig deep in her apron pocket and two shiny silver dollars would appear. One for each of us. She wrote letters to us regularly in a scrawl that only my mother could decipher. Near the end of her life, she boarded her first airplane to Cleveland to live with my parents.

Grandma’s gone, buried in the Blackfoot Cemetery next to Grandpa, but her doll looks at me from its place on my wall and reminds me every day of my gallant grandmother who never gave up.