Memories at the Lake House with Grandma

Memories at the Lake House with Grandma

In the summers, i would get the chance to spend a week with my grandma Petry and sometimes we would go to her lake house for the week. They owned a lake house on lake Wawasee in northern Indiana . I woke up this morning missing my grandma so bad that tears swelled up in my eyes.

After my mother died , my grandma Petry was one of the greatest female role models i had even though i only saw her twice a year. She was soft spoken as apposed to my stepmother who was always yelling and complaining. My grandmother rarely ,if ever ,complained about any thing and I don’t remember her getting angry , much less raising her voice. She was kind but could be stern if it was necessary.

My memory of my grandma this morning came back to me as I was cooking eggs for our sabbath breakfast. I remembered that when we stayed at the Lakes” , as they called it, she would fry up lots and lots of bacon and eggs. She would fry up the bacon and i could smell it from my bed and then she would cook the fried eggs in the bacon grease with salt and pepper. It wasn’t just that it was so delicious...Especially the bacon.. it was that for the first time in my life i could have as much as I wanted... it was all-you-can-eat bacon and eggs, toast , jam and orange juice. Then we all got up and ate breakfast together and she made so much there was leftovers.. It was awesome.

My grandfather was a laborer at General Motors and Delco Remi and didn’t have a large income so this was a sacrifice and was done in love.. thank you grandma for your love and a great memory together.

Another great memory was helping her plant flowers. My grandma loved flowers and her stone embankment at the lake house was filled with beautiful flowers. I would “help” her with the flowers... but i cant recall exactly what i did.. except maybe keep her company.

She would come out in the summer all covered up and wearing a sun bonnet. I would ask her why she was so covered up and she would say. To keep the sun off her .... but now that i know that her Native American birth father was dark skinned, i suspect it was that she didn’t want the sun to darken her skin so she didn’t look. “White”..

anyway we would sit and talk while she planted bulbs and such.... i almost always felt peace when i was alone with my grandma at times like this and she would share her feelings about Jesus and God and it helped me to want to be a follower of the Bible.

I am sure her faith was an example step to helping me find the restored church of Jesus Christ. I certainly always knew that my grandma loved Jesus.

When she was older i asked the sister missionaries to stop by and try and help her join the church. She accepting them in and listened, but told them that even if Jesus’s restored church was on the earth , she couldn’t leave her group of friends at her church... she was in her 80s... so i got that... but she did continue to have the sister missionaries over for dinner. I thought that was cool. And i think she did it partly because i was a member.

She has since been baptized and accepted the gospel covenants provided for her.

Kim