Somewhere throughout your life you meet people, never realizing down the road they will make a huge impact on your life.
I was so fortunate growing up to encounter women who were not related to me, who throughout the years have opened their arms and hearts to me and mine.
I guess I was about 14 when two of these women came into my life. They were both mothers of friends of mine. I’m sure there are other women out there who helped to make me to become the woman I am but these women especially made an impact on my life, in some ways not until decades later.
Mrs. Elder with her great-granddaughter Courtney.
Mrs. Hammer is the mother of one of my best friends. When I was 14 I would see her sometimes at school or at debate tournaments but mostly when she was picking up her daughter at school or if I was lucky at my house, or maybe I got invited to her house. She was an extremely intelligent woman who let you know what she was thinking while she was cooking or cleaning. She taught math in elementary school and she raised 3 sons and 3 daughters. At the time I met her each of her children were well on their way to being a whole lot taller than she was. That didn’t matter. She regularly brought them down to size and even though she did it politely she would bring their friends down to size too. I’ll never forget how she taught her oldest how to drive the family station wagon with the back-end loaded down with his siblings and at least one of their friends. She never batted an eye.
Katie, Beth & Grandma Hammer after a 4H competition in Lexington
Throughout the years I would see her from time to time and when I moved out of town she was always so welcoming when I would stop by to see her and her husband, Mr. Hammer. She won the heart of my husband when he brought her a country ham and she tested it by putting an ice pick into the ham, taking it out and smelling that ice pick. She had learned that from her daddy who worked in the dining car from the railroad.
That same year I turned 14 I met the mother of another friend. They lived in southwestern Kentucky. I had met my friend at camp. She was from a small town in western Kentucky and her mother had driven to pick her up at camp. She was so nice and I can still see that welcoming smile. I came to know her a lot better when I visited that small community while I was in college. Of course many more years later I married her son, moved to her farm and had her grandchildren. The one thing I will never forget about her was how welcoming she was. She never hesitated welcoming me into her home and treating me as family. And she did that for me, as non-family, for almost twenty years. And of course her son, my husband, loved her first. And she did a very good job raising him into the man he became.
The difference between these two women is that Mrs. Elder died not long after I became the next Mrs. Elder. Even though almost everyone in the family called her Grandma, my kids never had that pleasure. Since her husband and my parents had already died, she was the last grandparent for my children. So they were not raised with their grandparents in their life.
But that is where Mrs. Hammer stepped up and become their “Louisville Grandmother”. She did not miss acknowledging any milestone in their life. She made sure to check in from time to time just to see what they had been up to and what their grades looked like. And I learned that I needed to keep her in the loop as well, because I would hear it if I didn’t. If something was going on where extra prayers were needed, she was one of the first people I would call. If I wanted to brag on my children to someone who would understand, she was definitely the one I would call. I loved it when she would brag on them to me, sometimes so much that I might shed a tear or two.
She is not the only one who took an interest in my children. Mary Ruth Elder, Jimmy’s cousin’s wife, made sure she came to anything we had for the kids. Papa (Charles Hardison) and Mama Pat (Hardison) loved my kids as if they were their own. And their Godparents, (Kim Liebert, Kerry Pierce, Beth Hammer, Mary Ann McDaniel, John and Pat Carrico and Wayne and Diane Wilson) have accepted their roles as though it morphed over into them being a grandparent.
We all need a lot of people to get us through this life, at all stages. I’m just so blessed to have had these special people in my life, and my children’s.