Gram

Helen Viola Richie DeGroat, age 82 in 1984 / © 2025 Stephen Newton

My grandmother promised me that she would visit me after she died. As always, she kept her promise.

My summers were spent at my grandmother’s in the fertile region of the New York Finger Lakes. My forever memory of her is captured in the photo above—sitting at her kitchen table in her housecoat, where she would remain all day unless she went shopping or to the hairdresser’s. The only things missing from this snapshot are her china cup of black coffee and a Camel cigarette held between her arthritic fingers. During those halcyon summer days, we would sit at that table and talk late into the night—me buzzed on caffein and lightheaded from second hand smoke. She listened to every word I said, and never spoke down to me. We were equals. I loved her unconditionally, as she did me.

Helen Viola Richie DeGroat was born under the astrological sign of Leo in 1902. Her mother died when she was five forcing her father and her four siblings to live in a hotel, not uncommon in those days. She was married at 16, my mother was born soon afterward, and her two sisters and two brothers followed in short order. Though she forfeited a formal education for a family, Gram was the smartest and wisest person I have ever known. She used folk medicines to treat nearly everything—baking soda paste soothes bee stings, a piece of white bread dipped in milk and applied to an infection draws out the poison. At times, I believed she lived in two worlds. She could see the future, cast hexes on those who crossed her, read minds, and loved all animals, except cats, which she tolerated. She had a parrot that “swore like a trooper”, she raised canaries for sale, owned a succession of small dogs with names like Wettles, Andre, and Pierre, and nurtured all plants including her treasured african violets that thrived despite a toxic smog of cigarette smoke tempered by the scorched aroma of percolated Maxwell House coffee. She had seen and vanquished ghosts, particularly the old man from whom she bought her little bungalow. He had appeared several times at the bottom of her basement stairs to torment her until she stopped him.

“I went to the spiritualist church,” she said, her face blurred by a veil of blue smoke, “and they told me the next time I seen that bastard, to yell, ‘Go back to hell and leave me alone!’ And I’ll be damned if it didn’t work, Stevie. That old skinflint never showed his face again.”

One stormy night in the summer of 1959 we talked of death. To allay my fears, she joked about it. “Nothing to worry about, Stevie,” she assured me.“I’ll come back to see you for sure.”

Thirty years later, on a blustery afternoon in October, 1989, I returned to my design studio after a client meeting. The staff was upset. “A bird has been beating at the windows all morning,” they complained. The studio, as well as my home, sat isolated on a bluff high above the Susquehanna River. The large windows looked out on a view of Mahanoy Mountain looming across the river. It was a gorgeous, inspirational place to work.

That afternoon, I was in my office for only a few minutes, when the mockingbird appeared and beat its wings against the window. It returned again and again. When I went out on the deck, it flew to a magnolia tree and watched me. It continued to harass the studio the rest of the day and the next. Late on the third day, I went to the house and got my shotgun. I shot once into the air. The bird didn’t budge. I shot again. Still nothing. Then it dawned on me.

“Gram? Is that you?” The bird cocked its head, raised a wing. “Gram, if that’s you, it’s OK to go.”

I put the gun away.

The next day was Saturday. It was snowing. When I returned after a trip to town, my wife said the bird had tapped at our kitchen window one last time before it flew away and vanished into the snowy squal. A moment later, the phone rang. It was my aunt calling from California. Gram had died that morning after being in a coma for the last three days.

I said nothing to my aunt that day about the mockingbird’s visits. There was no need. Gram had kept her promise.

Gram and me

The scents of boiled wool, perfume, cigarette smoke, and burning leaves surrounded us this rare fall day when Gram and I posed for this picture before a Sunday drive.

My grandparents lived humbly, but they never complained. In terms of love and generosity they were the richest people I knew.

I miss them.

These days it feels as if the elves have all left Middle Earth.