31 Day Challenge: The Winona years

After my parents moved from Eagan to Mendota Heights, my dad began to travel frequently. This travel was not only for work, and there were many times that my mom had no idea where he was.
My mom's family still lived in her childhood home in Winona. She was the first to marry and have children, so her sisters were anxious to have us visit often.

My earliest memory of that time is me being in a playpen with a blanket draped over the top. My mom was reading, and the blanket was meant to block the light, and not wake me. I have recalled this memory repeatedly over the years. It was the only time I remember feeling safe and cared for by my mother. I felt warm, secure, and loved. This memory of my mom was what made it possible to feel anything for her in the following years.

Life in Winona was a mix of dealing with Hazel, my mom's mother, and John Willis, my beloved grandfather. Hazel was a first-generation immigrant. Her parents brought her to America, then passed soon after arriving from Italy. Hazel was adopted by an Irish family that lived in the wealthiest part of St. Paul. The father of the family had worked with Hazel’s father building the Cathedral in St.paul. Whenever we visited the foreboding house on Summit Avenue where Hazel was raised, it felt cold and unwelcoming. My grandmother shared the same traits as the house she grew up in all those years ago. Hazel was cold, unwelcoming, and perpetually cross.

This feeling followed Hazel to Winona; I'm sure of this because my grandmother was one of the most miserable people I have ever met. Each day as she woke me up, I was warned not to make her cross. After she woke me up, Hazel would usher me to the table, where she tied a bib on me. The bib was always a little too tight. If I didn't eat all my breakfast, the bib stayed on me. I remember walking through the house, asking anyone I found to please take the bib off me. The answer was always the same, and if they removed it, then Hazel would be cross with them.
However, there was one person I knew would take the bib off me, my beloved grandpa.

When I was born, my grandpa had been fighting prostate cancer for five years. When I was 4, it metastasized to his bones, and he was bedridden. Grandpa was a captive audience, and he never tired of my visits to his room. It was my grandpa that nursed me through my chickenpox, and he even let me scratch all my pox when everyone else scolded me.

Grandpa told me stories about him and his older brother and their adventures in the San Antonio oil business. It was this business that financed  Hazel and many of her children and grandchildren until her death in 1999. To this day, I grieve that my grandpa did not live long enough to be a more significant part of my life.