Watching Soaps with My Grandmother

Nanny Kay’s grave

Today, February 12, would have been my paternal grandmother’s 108th birthday. She died in 1990 at the age of 78. I wasn’t as close to Nanny Kay as I was to my maternal grandmother, but when I was a preteen, I spent a week or so with her during summers. Just me, without my siblings, which made the time special for me. This happened for two or three summers. I know I was eleven one of those summers, but I don’t remember if the others were before or after that year.

At the time, my paternal grandparents lived in Vancouver, Washington. My grandfather was still working as a traveling salesman. My grandparents picked me up at my home in Richland, Washington, as they traveled for his job. The back seat of their car was full of sales samples and their hanging clothes. For some reason, they traveled with many of their clothes hanging on a rod in the back seat instead of packing them all in a suitcase.

Nanny Kay with my younger siblings, a couple of years after I visited her during the summers

Nanny Kay was a good cook. She’d grown up in the small rural town of Arnold, Nebraska, where all my dad’s relatives had settled sometime in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Nanny Kay used what I considered to be old-fashioned farm recipes. During those summer visits, she taught me to snap green beans and shell peas. This was as close as I, a city girl, got to a farm. My mother used either canned or frozen green beans, and only used frozen peas (everyone in our family hated canned peas).

Snapping green beans was pretty easy, though I didn’t like the strings that got left behind. Shelling peas was harder and took longer. I tolerated peas (unlike my sister), but it took a long time to shell enough for three people to eat.

Nanny Kay and I passed the time while we prepared vegetables by watching soap operas. She watched soap operas every afternoon for a couple of hours. I don’t remember the names of the shows she liked (maybe my cousins, who spent more time with Nanny Kay than I did, can recall). What I remember is that everything stopped after lunch while we watched her shows. Only activities that could be performed in front of the television—like shelling peas or snapping beans—were permitted.

My mother and other grandmother never watched soap operas, so I was not familiar with this ritual. When I was in high school, I had friends who would rush home to watch Dark Shadows (which creeped me out), and a few people I knew were into All My Children (which didn’t start airing until a few years after my visits to my grandparents). But my mother thought soap operas were a waste of time and often immoral, and so they never became a habit in our household.

What struck me most about watching soap operas with Nanny Kay was that nothing changed from one summer to the next. I watched the shows with her for a week, and the next summer she could catch me up on what had happened in about ten minutes. By the end of Monday’s show, I was ready for the rest of the week. The same people were having mostly the same problems. Someone else might be in a coma this year than the prior summer, and another marriage might be on the rocks. But I could count on a couple of deadly diseases and an illicit affair or pregnancy. No wonder my mother didn’t want me watching the soaps.

What did you get away with at grandparents’ homes that your parents wouldn’t let you do?