A Long Way from Iowa:

From the Heartland to the Heart of France

What follows is the Prologue from my memoir, A Long Way From Iowa: From the Heartland to the Heart of France. I hope you enjoy it! You can learn more about it here: https://janethulstrand.com/advance-praise-for-a-long-way-from-iowa/

The grandmother who inspired me to write this book is not the one I loved when I was growing up. In fact, it is painful—or is it just kind of embarrassing?—for me to admit it, but I never really liked this grandmother, the Iowa grandmother—my mother’s mother—when she was alive.

More precisely, I had figured out all on my own at about the age of ten that she didn’t like me, and had done the only thing I could think of in retaliation, which was to not like her back. 

This was a sad secret I kept to myself, never daring or even wanting to share it with anyone who might’ve cared—my mother, my sister, or the pack of girl cousins I had grown up with, seven of us close in age, cousins almost as close as sisters, all of whom adored her. 

She often gave me and my cousins matching birthday presents. One year she made us all gingham skirts, hand-embroidered in a cross-stitch pattern, in various colors. (Mine was the violet one, and I loved it.) But it was the present she had given me when I was nine or ten that convinced me deep down in my heart that she really didn’t like me.

That was the year she gave us the ceramic figurines: they were marked on the bottom with the words “Little Homemaker” and MADE IN JAPAN. Each of the Little Homemakers had a different task: one of them was holding a piece of cake out toward an imaginary guest; another was wiping dishes: a third held a broom; one was stirring something in a mixing bowl, and another was sewing. They were all doing something useful: my little homemaker was talking on the phone and gazing into the distance. And that is where I got the idea that Grandma thought I talked too much. 

She was a rather stern woman, disinclined to tolerate “nonsense” and “sassiness,” and I was a lively, imaginative, sometimes willful child with plenty of both sass and nonsense in me, nonsense and sass that frequently spilled out. So the girl on the telephone was only the final bit of evidence I needed to confirm a suspicion I’d harbored for years.

The knowledge that my own grandmother didn’t like me was a heavy burden, but not nearly as heavy as the burden of knowing I didn’t like her. When she died at the age of ninety-two, I was the only one of her sixteen grandchildren not present at her funeral. I didn’t have to explain my absence: I was the only one who lived far away, 1200 miles away, in New York City. But since I had traveled the same distance without a moment’s hesitation to attend my other grandmother’s funeral several years earlier, I knew that when I chose to stay away this time, my mother must have been unable to avoid seeing any longer, by my words and acts of omission if nothing else, that there was something missing in our relationship. That must have been painful for her; she loved her mother very much, and she also loved me. However, she never said a word about it to me.

It wasn’t until years later that I began to reassess my relationship with my grandmother. It started shortly after my mom died, as I began to go through her personal papers. One of the first things I found, in a drawer she had dedicated to storing special things, was a file folder in which she had saved cards she’d gotten from us on Mother’s Days. In the same folder were a few tiny notebook pages, carefully stored in a plastic sleeve, written in my grandmother’s hand. The pages held entries from a journal she had written in 1931, when my mother and her brothers were young children. I opened the pages carefully, heart racing for some reason I didn’t understand. Then I read:

My babies are growing up. I must write down some of their sayings and doings to help me remember on a lonesome day…We got 100 marbles for 5 cents tonight, and had lots of fun playing marbles after we got home from town. A new phonograph record for Elmer, “The Little Things of Life,” and a big bag of overripe bananas to fill up on.

As I read these words I was transported, with a strong, sympathetic pang I felt as a physical ache, to those days during the Depression when my mother was a little girl in a poor, but happy, family. My grandmother was then a young mother in love with her children, wise enough to know that “a lonesome day” would come, hopeful that capturing the memory of happier times might help her when it did. For the first time I felt the hardness in my heart where she was concerned begin to melt. And I wanted to read more.

I knew there was more, much more. My parents’ house was full of boxes of old letters, journals, and other assorted mementos that my mother had saved, both her own and her mother’s.

I remembered that my grandmother had always kept a tiny notebook about her, tucked into her apron pocket, and that she would jot things in it in spare moments between doing her household tasks. I knew that if any of those little notebooks had survived, the most likely place they would be stored was in my parents’ home, somewhere in the overwhelming piles of stuff.

I set out immediately on a passionate quest to find my grandmother’s journals, a quest that lasted several years and involved many hours of discouraging and tedious work, sifting through piles of old papers. I hoped to find many years’ worth of diaries; in the end, all I found was a few composition books she had written in as a schoolgirl, a few journals from her later years, and quite a few letters between her and my mother. But that was enough to fuel and guide me in my search for the grandmother I had never really known.

Back to Iowa…

Janet Hulstrand is an American writer, editor, writing coach, and teacher of writing and of literature who lives in France. She is the author of Demystifying the French: How to Love Them, and Make Them Love You, and A Long Way from Iowa: From the Heartland to the Heart of France; and coauthor of Moving On: A Practical Guide to Downsizing the Family Home.