Small But Mighty

My Grandma knew that it was only Jesus who could change the world. Our job was, as the song had it, to “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way/to be happy in Jesus/but to trust and obey.” It has been 125 years since she was born and nearly 30 years since she died, and the world does not remember her. But my guess is that with her afghans, sugar cookies, poems, riddles, jokes, little chats with birds, and prayers, she made the world a lot better in ways that will only be seen in the light of eternity.

Grandma Sowers as a little girl (center)

How I wish I had known her when she was younger! I was the last grandchild but one, and she was 76 when I was born. But I still remember my Grandma Sowers, my maternal grandmother, skipping rope in her early 80s for my cousin Matt, my little brother, and me on our trips over to Van Wert, Ohio, where she was living in part of the ground floor of an old Victorian home converted into apartments. I still dream of that place occasionally with its wonderful sunroom facing the street where she would sit pedaling her Minnesota treadle sewing machine that she had bought in 1921 for eight whole dollars.

That wonderful house with its high ceilings and marvelous dark wood panels was a place of comfort for me. It was there at her neighbor Marguerite’s apartment that we watched Charles and Diana’s royal wedding. It was while we were visiting her there that my dad had his first heart attack in the middle of the night. She took care of my brother and me that week before my dad was taken back to Indiana where he had the first of his quadruple bypass surgeries. That was ok with me. She had watched me at our home a few years before when my brother was born. It was there that I would sit and look at her parakeets, to whom she would talk, as she talked to all of God’s creatures, with a gentleness that was party natural but partly the result of grace.

She was always a blur of energy and charity. She had a hard time sitting and chatting after a meal. As soon as she had finished—and she was a fast eater—she would jump up to start cleaning up, sometimes sweeping the dishes out from under you as soon as you had finished. After cleaning up she would then get to work on some other task—sweeping, making something on that sewing machine, or crocheting afghan blankets (just “afghans” to us) for her family, friends, or missionaries she knew. She loved to make sugar cookies and lay them in shirt boxes. Several of my cousins report that though they have the recipe, they’ve never been able to make them taste quite as “soft and amazing” (cousin Kyle’s words) as Grandma made them. And if you said that you were going to get a pizza, she would disappear for a moment only to return with twenty or fifty dollars. “Oh, Mom, we don’t need that,” my mother, would say. “But you could use it, couldn’t you?” she would infallibly reply.

She was that way with pretty much everybody. Those quilts—she must have made a hundred in addition to all the mending she did for so many people—went to friends around the globe. She supported a whole bunch of mostly Baptist missionaries through her own Baptist church in town. I loved going to church with her when we visited. It was always said of Baptists that going to services on Sunday morning was expected, going to church on Wednesday meant you wanted to run the business meeting, and going to church on Sunday nights meant that you loved the Lord or loved the preacher. She loved both and would often express herself in poems such as one I have in her handwriting titled, “Heartfelt Gratitude to my Pastor,” which begins:

Sometimes in life we all forget
To say the little things
Of how much someone means to us
Like the joy your preaching brings.

The pastor, she says in the following stanzas, is a “staunch friend,” a “guiding light,” “One to whom I could turn/To teach me wrong and right.”

Though she did not go to school past 8^th grade, like many other Americans of that generation she had learned to love poems and thought that expressions of love and prayer were best done in rhyme. I’ve still got a box of her papers that my Aunt Myrna gave to my mom when Grandma died in 1993 at the age of 95. Included with the above are all sorts of clippings of jokes, stories, little sermons, and poems that she collected, copied down, or wrote herself. She would copy out her favorites by hand to send to me and other family as the situation warranted. “What God hath Promised” was sent multiple times, as was “I Said a Prayer for You Today.”

Some might squirm at such simple sentiments in old-fashioned verse, but the only “cringe” about them is the shameful cringe I make when thinking about her holiness compared to mine. She really did listen to her pastors and spend “quiet time in the Word,” as Baptists would say about their reading and prayer over Scripture, every day. And I knew upon receiving her cards with those lines written on a slip of paper that she really had said a prayer for me that day as she did every day. In fact, her prayer list was long enough that it took several sessions per day to intercede for all her family, her friends, the pastor, the missionaries she supported (whose cards or pictures were all pinned on a bulletin board on her wall), and anybody else who asked for her prayers.

By the time she was in her nineties, having trouble with her eyes, various organs, and her bones and joints (the raciest joke she told was about going to bed with arthritis, bursitis, or “one of those Itis boys”), she would ask quite plaintively, “Why does the Lord leave me here like this?” One of us would say, “I guess the Lord still has some work for you to do.” The work of prayerful witness is too often undervalued—even by those practicing it over a long period of time.

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Dollie Marie Holland Sowers was born on January 13, 1898, to Cloys and Amanda (Peters) Holland. Her name was suggested by a neighbor who saw how small she was and said, “She looks just like a dolly!” (I’m not sure why the “ie” at the end of her name.) They were all small people on that side of my family. I’m sitting right now on a wooden chair made by her Grandpa Peters, which is really proportioned about right for my nine-year-old. But she was especially small. She claimed to have reached four foot, ten inches, or maybe eleven, but by the time I knew her, age and gravity had reduced her to four foot, eight inches at most. Her standing joke was to tell her descendants, “Come over and stand by me, shorty!” When the proud child did, she would then say, “Why are you always looking down on me?”

One of eight children eventually, she moved with her parents, two uncles, and their families in 1899 from Plymouth, Indiana, out to farm in the area around Zion, North Dakota. They bought land from the government at $15 an acre and grew wheat and oats. I have a copy of the picture of the sod house they lived in before building a farmhouse. Tiny Dollie stands in the doorway with her mother on one side, father on the other, and her older brother Jay sitting on a horse. Because the sod house was leaning, three or four logs are visible on one side propping the house up.

Given that they were only there till she was four, she didn’t have a lot of concrete memories. Snow filled several of them. She recalled her father stretching a wire from the house to the barn in the winter so as not to lose the way in blizzards. She remembered the snow being so deep and hard that he had to create steps up from the doorway to the top of the snow in order to even get to the barn and that when it was like that the sleigh would go flying along over the tops of fences. My favorite, however, was her first sight of an automobile coming toward the house while she was sitting on a fence. She told me she thought at first it was a dragon because of the smoke and noise it was making. She would often marvel that she had lived from a time when horses and carriages were the ordinary forms of transportation to a time when air travel was common.

Shortly after her father had built a wooden house, the family decided to return to Indiana to care for her ailing grandfather. Her father farmed until the children were grown and then ran a livery stable in LaPaz, Indiana. Her own schooling came to an end after she suffered from smallpox and missed most of a school year. She ended up getting a job working as a telephone operator for several years until she met one Victor Orin Sowers, an employee of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the father of two children, Margaret and Marvin, by a previous marriage.

They married in March of 1921 and proceeded to have six children, four boys and two girls, all born there in their little house in LaPaz. I never met my grandfather, but from all the stories that I heard from my family, he was both a loving and kind father who was a delight to listen to a ball game with (he became a Yankees fan during that golden age of Ruth and Gehrig and I inherited this fandom through my mother’s stories) and to share a joke, but, like many men, prone to fits of temper. When they first married, he smoked. According to the story, Grandma Sowers asked him to stop several times. After one request he got angry enough to take the pack of cigarettes in his pocket and throw them down the stairs. But he never smoked again.

Another story: he had gotten a riding mower and managed to tip it over. When Grandma came out the door and saw him, he said, “Well, stop looking at me and help, you dummy!” She very quietly muttered, “Who’s the dummy?” as she came back in from helping him.

That’s about as stern as she got. As my cousin Marsha says, she never said anything bad about anybody. And though I’m not sure about the timing, at some point she had a conversion experience among the Baptists, after which so did Victor a bit later. It was at this point that her natural gentleness was converted to Christian charity. Nor was it, despite some of the sentimental wordings of the poems she loved, an easy thing. Raising six children during the Depression was not easy. I recall hearing about how she had to be forced to get a new winter coat one year since hers was so threadbare. Given her tenderheartedness, she would usually wait for the chickens to get hit by a car if she didn’t have anybody to do the chopping.

Her charity even then began, but did not end, in the home. Those known in the 1920s and ’30s as “bums” or “hobos” had a way of marking homes where a bit of food or other gifts might be found. The Sowers house was so marked. In fact, at one point my Uncle Everett (b. 1922) fell into a nearby pond before he could swim. One of the hobos fished him out before he drowned and brought him back to the house. Sometime later this same hobo was accused (falsely) of a crime. Grandma hid him in the barn till the truth was found out.

My mom, Karen, was the final child born on August 17, 1939, when Grandma was 41 years old and the oldest children were into or entering adulthood. Grandma Sowers’ prayer life kicked into high gear over the next few years. Uncle Vic was already in the Army Air Corps when Pearl Harbor was bombed. The other four boys eventually entered either the Army or Navy, Lowell (b. 1927) having to lie about his age to get in. She prayed every day for these sons, who were represented by a flag in the front window with a blue star for each one in the war. My mom remembered the letters that came home with passages cut out by the censors. While my grandfather did his share of the worrying, Uncle Blaine used to say, it was Grandma Sowers who did all the writing.

Things were toughest with Everett, serving on a destroyer in the Pacific. For many reasons, nobody heard from him for more than a year until Blaine, also in the Navy, discovered him in a barber’s chair in San Francisco. He experienced some of the worst of the war, suffering from what we would now call PTSD afterward. But he lived. Those blue stars on the flag were never replaced by the gold stars marking the fallen.

At the end of the war, Victor and Dollie moved a couple hours east to Van Wert, Ohio, where my Aunt Myrna (b. 1934) and my mom finished out school and began their adult life. There were a great many grandchildren and great-grandchildren to come along, most of whom remember reading Scripture and devotions with her and spending time in the kitchen, making those cookies or canning beans or tomatoes, and laughing together. She was, like my mother and aunt, a giggler who loved to see the youngest of her brood. Her perpetual refrain whenever any baby appeared was that kids were much funnier than television. And of all her own, she would always say with sincerity, “Isn’t he the smartest thing?”

A four-stanza poem on their 40^th recounted blessings and thanksgiving for their children and grandchildren, concluding that the “happiness and sorrow/Along the path of life” were confirmation of “the vows you take/When you are man and wife.” They were to have more happiness and sorrows over the next ten years. More grandchildren were born. My grandfather suffered a stroke and declined at the end. And my mom, who had been single all those years, got engaged. My grandfather’s laconic reply when my father came to talk to him about marrying his youngest daughter was, “Well, Phil, I haven’t got anything against you.” He would not make it to the wedding as he died the month before. Uncle Everett walked Mom down the aisle.

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My brother and I, born three and six years later, were numbers 22 and 23 of the grandchildren, out of whom all but one lived past infancy. Though we didn’t get to have her in her prime, her golden years were golden for us. We would go stay with her for a week every year and she would come stay with us for a few weeks every six months or so. I didn’t think of it as a child, but I think after Grandpa died and my mom moved two hours away to Indiana, she had a difficult time. In addition to her husband, four of her siblings had passed away by the 1980s. Several copies of a poem titled “In memory of my Sisters Fern and Dortha” are in my box. Quite often she ate her dinner on a television tray in front of the television to combat the loneliness. The poems she copied out included ones such as “Shut in,” the first four lines of which are:

There was so much I wanted to do, dear Lord—
So much I wanted to do;
But now with most of it still undone,
I’m shut in alone with you.

At some point in our childhood, Grandma Sowers, who was afraid of water (she would get nervous, my mom said, if the bathtub level was too high) but not necessarily of heights, had climbed up on her step stool to put away something in the very high Victorian kitchen cupboards. Her pelvis snapped and she fell, requiring a new situation. Aunt Myrna and Uncle Willie built an addition on their house that allowed her to have a bathroom, kitchenette, and sitting room. It was a good set-up, but I think her visits to stay with us increased a bit.

We didn’t mind. She would sit in the front lawn in the evening as my brother and I would shoot baskets in the driveway, promising us money if we made “ten baskets.” Given that ten baskets is a couple minute’s work, we never collected the full amount of what she had promised us. But it was the idea of delighting her that counted.

She used a walker in the last years after the break of her pelvis, but her method of using it was somewhat comical. She would pick it up, walk three or four steps, and then touch down again to push off. When things went wrong, her usual expletive was, “Fiddlesticks!” When things were surprising, she would let go with an “Oh, my stars and garters!”

And she continued to pray and try to be useful. At one point, Mrs. Ferguson, my brother’s piano teacher, called us and asked if we wanted a bunch of walnuts from her massive backyard tree. We filled a big box and Grandma Sowers spent the summer shelling them sitting in the cool summer morning on the westward-facing deck in back of our house. One morning she had gone out there and we heard her talking to somebody. Arriving in back we saw that her conversation partner was a little bird that had landed on her head and was chirping back at her.

It was a fitting thing. She who loved Jesus so much was happy to love and serve all his creatures, from the birds of the air to the hobos who bore His image, to the people whom the missionaries were serving, whether in American colleges or Africa. Though I doubt Grandma Sowers had heard of her, I’ve long thought she was much like Thérèse of Lisieux, the French Carmelite who died the year before she was born. Pictures of the young French woman look just a bit like the pictures of Dollie in her twenties, but it is much more than that. Thérèse dreamed of becoming a missionary but discovered her vocation was to be love in the heart of the Church, to support them by prayer. She wrote, “Jesus does not demand great actions from us, but simply surrender and gratitude.” She had a “little way” of serving Jesus that I saw in Grandma Sowers. One of the poems to which Grandma has signed her name is titled “Small Steps.”

Do not despair, that you cannot change
The world in a day or two.
Instead, just give your very best
In the little things you do.
Then you will find in days to come
When taken all together,
These little things did change and make
The world a little better.

Grandma Sowers knew that it was only Jesus who could change the world. Our job was, as the song had it, to “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way/to be happy in Jesus/but to trust and obey.” It has been 125 years since she was born and nearly 30 years since she died, and the world does not remember her. But my guess is that with her afghans, sugar cookies, poems, riddles, jokes, little chats with birds, and prayers, she made the world a lot better in ways that will only be seen in the light of eternity. My cousin Kyle calls her “small but mighty.” She was.

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The featured image is courtesy of the author.