My paternal grandmother was born in May of the year the Titanic was launched and sank. I say it that way because it’s how she used to say to me, and to my kids. She was never ashamed of growing old, but if you wanted to know how old she was, you might need to think a bit or look it up. To me, she was always an adult of indeterminate age, with mature confidence, a sense of wonder and childhood, and the energy of young adulthood remaining vivid within her until her final years.

Regina McChesney was her name for the greater portion of her lifetime. Herman McChesney, her second husband, was my step-grandfather. Somehow, that never really occurred to me until I was in my early teens, though I was always aware of my father’s father having been someone else. In his own ways, Herman was as special as she, but this is not his story.

This is really not her story either. It will be small pieces of the parts of my story in which she played a featured role as one of the two most loved and trusted people in my life. Her part was far too important for me to be able to offer more than a few small snapshots of the influence she had on my character.

Born Regina -with hard g, as in the word go; “Reh-gee-nuh”- Simmer, she married young and had given birth to two boys before age twenty. She was divorced before age thirty. She and Herman married around the year nineteen forty.

They built the home that I knew as Grandma’s House on land that her father sold to them, in nineteen fifty-two. The house was on a small hill set back from the shore of Ottertail Lake and over-looked a county highway on the other side. They didn’t own lakeshore, but had access to put in a dock and lift for their small boat. It was a small house, roughly L-shaped, with two bedrooms, one bathroom, living room and kitchen. There was a wide hall that functioned as entryway, laundry, and furnace room. They designed and built it themselves, with the help of relatives, of course. In its earliest incarnation, the house was a small cabin that consisted of what later were the two bedrooms and the bathroom.

There was a small dirt road, one lane and perhaps a total of seven hundred feet long, that left the highway three houses south of theirs. It looped around between the four houses on that stretch of highway and the cabins on the lakeshore, and back to the highway north of their yard. Grandma and Grandpa owned two of the lots between the dirt road and the highway. On one of the lots, they had built a small, warm-weather guest house. It had two medium-large rooms and a bathroom. One of the rooms had only screens for the three outside walls -with canvas covers that could be rolled down in wet weather.