The Rose of the Hills

My mother told me she had been known as "The Rose of the Hills," but I never knew her as anything but Great Grandma. When we visited, we drove for seeming hours down country roads and through the hills of southern New York state. My father knew the hills like the back of his hand. Grandma no longer lived up in the hills, but in a big white house in town. Uncle Leo lived with her. He was a stranger to me, though I'm not sure why. It was probably my own timid shyness that made it feel so. That and the fact that he was so often out working in the garage on things unfamiliar to little girls when we came to visit. Once he was packing ball bearing for a car or tractor... Most often we visited with Grandma in her dining room. Once she showed us where to find four-leaf clovers in the backyard, and another time she showed me the mint plant by her back door and told me a little about it. Timothy the cat rubbed his sides against her legs as we sat on the porch steps.

In my genealogy search I found that Grandma and her sister Maude had both been known as the "Belles of the Hills." Maude was blond haired and blue eyed while Grandma had dark eyes and hair, but all that was far, far from the mind of a small girl who knew the younger Grandma only by a picture on the wall. What I wouldn't give to fly back in time and get to know her.