Challenge Question Week 11
This week our topic is our Grandparents. Did you live close to your grandparents ? If they lived far away did you ever travel to visit them? What was that like? Or were they part of your everyday life? Share your memories.
This week I have posted a personal photo as my central image. May I introduce my paternal grandparents, Dot and Perc Morse. This photo was taken with their first great grandchiId, my daughter, late 1972 outside their home in Footscray, Victoria. I was blessed to have such wonderful people in my life. To grow up with both sets of grandparents both my maternal and paternal grandparents was extremely fortunate. I also knew both my paternal great-grandmothers. Next week I will share their stories with you.
I hope you are enjoying the challenges and as each week progresses you are building a solid base from which to write your own story. All the little, forgotten memories that come floating in when you are writing, these all add authenticity to your writing.
Are you finding the writing process any easier? I hope so! Next week for week 12 we are going to attempt something very different. So stay tuned.
hinterlandwriting 
Eileen Walder wrote ….. My darling Grandad took me to Belgium when I was eleven and showed me the then still intact trenches and battlefields where he had fought as a boy soldier in WW1. He had lied about his age so his widowed mother could get his pay. He told me stories about the battles he was in, the horrors of Ypres and Passchendaele where he was injured and lay in a field hospital for weeks. He and I cried together. He never told anyone else these stories, not even his wife or my mother, his only child. During my teen years I shared my passion for WW1 poetry with him but only when we were alone. He died aged 60 when shrapnel from his WW1 wounds moved to his brain. I was at that time writing my Uni assignment on Wilfred Owen! His beloved old dog Rex died the very next Remembrance Day 11 November at 11am.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Julie Hikaiti wrote I lived in a small country town on the Darling Downs and my grandparents had a farm 10 minutes out of town. I have very early childhood memories of my grandparents’ farm, they sold it and moved to town when I was 4 but I could still draw a detailed map of their house and property so I obviously spent a lot of time there. My grandparents every morning at 4.30 am would have Sao biscuits with cheese and tomato and a cup of tea, then my grandfather would go out and work on the farm, he would come back in for a hot breakfast, then at morning tea time we would take him a thermos of tea and biscuits or cake and have a little picnic in the middle of the paddock. I remember Christmas time on the farm with my cousins (twin boys a little younger than me), I remember my nan sitting my older brother and I on the kitchen sink and telling us not to get down until she came back, as she saw a brown snake in the yard and set off to kill it, I thought she was the bravest lady I had ever known. When my grandparents moved into town they were only 2 streets away, so would spend a lot of time there. Nan was always growing veggies, and her flowers were beautiful! There was not 1 prickle in her huge yard as she used to get on hands and knees and dig them out, even when she was in her 80’s, I asked her why she was doing that and she said, ” so they don’t get in your feet”. When I think of my Nan I think of an overwhelming sense of love. Even our dog loved my Nan, when mum and dad went to work and us kids went to school our dog would walk up to nan’s and stay there until about 5 pm then he would walk home, he did this until he was killed at the age of 19, blind and deaf but still went to Nan’s every day. Sadly Nan developed dementia in her mid 80’s which is the main reason why I chose to study this at uni. I often come home from work and open my front door and as I walk into my house I smell my Nan so strongly, I also have things pop into my head that I am sure are thoughts sent from her. For example, I am very sentimental and have some things of my Nan’s, one being the large Mikasa dinner set that we used to use at Christmas time, I accidentally broke a plate and was devastated, when I heard “oh for goodness sake it’s only a plate” that is exactly what she would have said, I had to giggle. I miss her every single day.
LikeLiked by 1 person