Yay!! Runs into the thread throwing confetti!
My grandmother Esther, who is one of the most wonderful people I know, today reached her 100th birthday.
Grandma has three daughters, eight grandchildren(I’m the oldest of those), and ten great-grandchildren, plus assorted nieces and nephews and their descendants. We had a party for immediate family the day after Thanksgiving, and there will be another today, for everyone else.
Grandma is very much with us. She can walk, (with a walker), has half her own teeth, and can eat anything she wants. For her 99th birthday lunch, a year ago, she had two slices of pizza and half a can of beer! 
Her hearing and eyesight are not the best, but she still writes poetry and counts her calories, since she worries about her weight.
She’s been a blessing to the family all of her life. Even during the Depression, when there was little to give, she and my grandfather helped others, sometimes giving them a place to sleep for a while, sometimes meals. She was a wife, a mother, a schooteacher, a Sunday school teacher, a church worker, a community volunteer, you name it.
I can’t tell the story of such a life in one thread. But let me tell my favorite story, about how she and my grandfather got married.
The two of them had been engaged, but there was a quarrel and she gave him back his ring. As Grandma puts it “I was the one who made up”. And when she did Grandpa wanted to get married, as in now, right now. I always figured he was afraid to lose her again. She said she couldn’t get married without telling her parents.
There was another complication. She was a teacher in a one-room country schoolhouse, and would lose her job if she got married. The two previous teachers had quit because they married, to older brothers of my grandfather!!!
The next weekend Grandma took the train to Topeka, meeting my grandfather there. They traveled on to Liberty, Missouri, in the next county over from Kansas City, Missouri. Grandpa figured their public records wouldn’t be posted in any KC newspaper, where even a Kansan in the boonies might see them. After getting the license they went back to a church in Kansas City that my grandfather had attended while going to auto mechanics school there. The pastor married them on May 8, 1926, and they were married until Grandpa’s death in 1982.
Returning to Kansas he stayed in Topeka and she lived in Paxico with her parents, until the school year was up and their marriage made public. He might visit her on weekends in Paxico, or she might go to Topeka, where they would get a hotel room for the weekend. Grandma once told me “I still remember how those desk clerks would look at us!”
Happy Birthday Grandma, I love you so much.
