In Memory of Bobbie Cordella Fletcher
Cate Clother, Editor-in-chief
When I asked Papa how he managed to get Grandma to fall for him, he said, “Buy her a hamburger and sing her a song, and she’ll follow you anywhere.” No truer words have been spoken since. She loved food, and she loved music, and the only thing she loved more than those two things was people.
She loved all kinds of people. It didn’t matter what a person was struggling with; Grandma saw the best in everybody and always had a smile and a full plate for whoever turned up on her doorstep. Legend has it that travelers once left a hobo mark on her fence meaning “kindhearted lady,” and from that day on hobos would stop at her place for a cool drink and a bite to eat. Her Okie parents instilled her with these values, along with staying glad in the midst of trouble. She said her folks “always wore a smile” even through the hardest times. Grandma was raised alongside her six sisters and two brothers on farms, first in Oklahoma as a sharecropping family and then on the road in California as migrant farmers when displaced by the Dust Bowl. Grandma had very happy childhood memories, and loved telling stories about turning a cotton stalk into a Christmas tree, listening to country & western music at barn dances, and sleeping cuddled up in the same bed with all six of her sisters.
Everything wasn’t sunny all the time, that’s for sure, but Grandma always chose to keep on the sunny side. I think that was the secret to her long life. Her first love and father of her three children, honky tonk musician George Lewis, was killed in a car accident in their new home of Dunsmuir, California when he was 29. At just 24 years old she found herself a widowed single-mother with three young daughters to provide for, with just “one dollar left” in the jar. Most of her family had gone back to Texas and Oklahoma, and she felt completely alone in northern California. She remarried a logger and moved with him to a logging camp where she cooked, cleaned, and even brewed beer for the camp. After he passed, Grandma married my papa, Monk Simmons, a logger, musician, and fisherman, and they spent thirty happy years together.
Grandma and Papa loved to fish together on Shasta Lake in their fishing boat, and kept a beautiful garden with lots of fruit trees at their little stone house in south Dunsmuir. Grandma enjoyed harvesting wild foods, including blackberries and watercress, and their freezer and cupboards were always fit to burst with jams, jellies, frozen fish, deer meat, and berries–enough to last the long winter in the mountains. It was at this little stone house where many of her grandkids and great-grandkids made their happiest memories–where they spent long hot summers playing in the sweetpea field, running through the sprinklers, picking plums and helping can plum jelly, watching old black & white comedy shows on TV, rifling through the fishing tackle box, and eating cherry pie while the crickets chirped in the twilight.
I was so lucky to have a very close relationship with Grandma. Because her daughter, my mother, was in and out of the picture, Grandma and Papa raised me as their own. I lived with them for the first four years of my life and, after moving out with my mom, spent as much time as I possibly could at their house. Grandma held me, fed me, sang to me, talked with me, and soothed me to sleep. She taught me to laugh in the face of trouble and sing until the storm passed by. She called me her “pretty precious,” and loved me just because I was hers. I wouldn’t be here today without her; I wouldn’t know how to love and be loved without her.
It’s staggering to think about the impact that one life can have on so many. I am not the only grandchild that Grandma loved like this; many of us would truly have been lost without her. And it wasn’t only her kids who were impacted by her; sisters, brothers, friends, neighbors, step-children, nieces and nephews, townsfolk, lonesome travelers, and acquaintances were all blessed by her abundant love. When an old childhood friend of mine learned that she had passed, she wrote, “I will never forget your sweet grandma and her cinnamon toast and the way she brought love and normalcy to your world and vicariously mine.”
Thank you, Grandma, for loving me in your perfectly normal way; with clean, crisp sheets on the bed and a kiss goodnight, and the promise of cinnamon toast in the morning. You are the love of my life, and I will carry your spirit with me for the rest of my days, until we meet again.