Welcome Home

Robin Crane

Jun 3

10 min read

🌳Chapter 20

From the church parking lot, the French farm was a straight shot north on State Highway 30. Bright sunshine flooded the window behind us, making the wall of storm clouds banked ahead look even darker. The wind blew so hard it rattled the inside of the truck. What frightened me most was the color. The sky had turned a dark, dirty red. That sky matched my mood—angry and terrified.

Poor Baptist babies. We teethe on hymnals while learning about the end times. We accept Jesus early because we already know about the fiery pits of hell. That storm looked like hell, and we were headed straight for it.

As we neared, the storm swallowed the sunlight. Grandpa turned on the headlights and said, “It’s a duster.” He put the pedal to the metal, then turned left at the mailbox marked “French.” We pulled up behind the house, and Grandpa let us out before driving on to put the truck in the barn. Grandma hurried to a closet and came back with a stack of old towels. She dampened them, rolled them, and stuffed them along the windowsills and doorjambs.

Then the storm hit. The first blast of dirt shook the entire house. I dropped into a crouch and covered my ears. The roar sounded like static turned all the way up. I climbed onto a green couch Grandma called a divan and squeezed next to Mark. He tried to be tough, but I could feel him shaking too. After what felt like hours, it ended. Pink sunlight returned, and a fine powder hung in the air. It was eerily quiet. Mark looked at me and said, “Welcome home,” then laughed.

Grandma said it would take a while for the dust to settle and that we could help her clean later. Mark jumped up, so I followed him to the door. He pushed against it, shoving the drift aside until he could squeeze through. Had we landed on Mars? In some places, the fine red dust had piled into drifts like snow. In others, it lay flat and rippled like sand on a beach.

We marched along the fence line, keeping the house in sight. Grandpa came out the back door and headed for his barn. Mark ran off after him, leaving me by myself. The devil storm left behind a sun that was already burning my skin. I looked around, taking inventory of all the things my mom had warned me about. Before long, I was feeling sorry for myself and crying again.

That morning, Maggie had told me that when times were hard, I should ask myself how I could be a blessing. So I trudged back to the house to ask Grandma how I could help her clean. My jaw dropped when she held out a feather duster. I could have sworn I heard angels singing “Hallelujah.” I had always wanted one. It had a red wooden handle and a plume of red and black feathers, just like the ones I had seen on The Carol Burnett Show.

Dinner that night was another new experience. Our meat choices were tuna or sardines, with cold pork and beans and an orange on the side. We wrinkled our noses at the sardines, but Grandma convinced us to try the tuna. Mark opened the can with a little key that rolled a strip of metal around the can as he turned it. We dipped saltine crackers straight into the tuna and shared a pickle, but it wasn’t anything like Mom’s pickles. It was sweet and I didn’t like it.

It had been quite a first day, followed by a lonely first night. I slept in a room so big I felt swallowed. I sandwiched myself between the bedsheets, making a private cocoon, and cried myself to sleep. The next morning, I woke with swollen eyes, a pounding head, and a hungry belly. I had slept in my clothes, and now both my clothes and the sheets were soaked with urine. Mom had spent the previous winter trying to put a stop to what she called “my nonsense.” Now, lying in a wet bed, I stared at the water stains on the ceiling and cried again. If I lay in bed this late at home, Mom would have already checked my forehead for a fever.

I finally got up and looked out the window at the bright sunshine. My suitcase sat on the floor. I should have changed my clothes and brushed my teeth, but a sudden blast of piano music sent me running to the living room. Grandma Lola sat close to the television as Nadia’s Theme blared through the room. An enormous bag of oranges sat on the floor beside her. She gave me a lopsided glance, then turned back to her “stories.”

I was so hungry I could smell the orange peel as it dropped into her lap. I asked if I could have an orange. She cupped a hand around her ear. “Heh?” She shrugged and rolled me an orange as if she were bowling. I snatched it up, closed the bedroom door, and changed into dry clothes. I ate the orange and then began poking around in the bedroom closet.

Back then, I knew nothing about the house. Until that summer, I had only visited for short stretches of time. I knew what the rooms looked like, but I knew nothing about the lives that had unfolded inside them.

In 1931, Grandpa French built Lola a whimsical farmhouse. Cement, sand, and lime were mixed into stucco and spread over the exterior until the house looked as though it had been iced with meringue. Grandpa finished it with scalloped trim that made it look a little like a gingerbread house. A covered red-brick porch ran across the front. By the time I arrived, decades of blowing Oklahoma dirt had toasted the tips brown.

Inside, golden pine floors stretched through the U-shaped hallway, and the unpolished boards were still slick enough for Mark and me to skate in our stocking feet. Tucked into a crook of the hall was a telephone niche with its own lamp and phone book. I loved sitting there, flipping through the phone book and pretending to be Mrs. Wiggins from The Carol Burnett Show.

Each door had its own unique skeleton key, so I pretended to lock myself in the rooms. The basement door opened to a tiny concrete staircase that disappeared into the darkness below. To me, the whole place seemed built for a fairy tale. I imagined secrets hiding behind the doors and something spooky waiting at the bottom of the stairs.

The house smelled like my school library, perhaps because books were everywhere. A thick coating of dust covered the stacks, along with piles of magazines and newspapers. I pretended to clean while Lola stayed planted in front of the television, the volume so high that I finally left the room. Armed with my feather duster, I went exploring.

My first stop was the master bedroom. I had to squeeze through the door because it banged against things piled on the floor. Lola seemed to have kept everything she had ever owned. Every inch of space held something, and the only open area was a spot on her bed shaped like her rounded body. Her clothes hung from wooden hangers, filling the closet. Boxes of shoes and hats filled the space beneath her bed, each carefully wrapped in paper and tucked inside its original box.

The hats and gloves looked too fancy for the Lola I knew. These treasured things belonged to her? I tried to imagine her wearing one of those hats, but I couldn’t. Years later, I learned there had been another Lola before the one I knew. Before she married Grandpa, she had been a young woman with plans of her own.

In 1897, Lola Bell Roberts was the firstborn of Will and Inez Roberts, who raised seven children. They expected every one of them, daughters included, to make something of themselves. Lola did. In 1918, at age twenty-one, she was a cute, petite young woman working toward her teaching degree from Southwestern Normal School in Weatherford. (Today that school is named Southwestern Oklahoma State University.)

In 1919, Lola was an educator at Brookside School, also known as School District #93, a one-room rural school in Meridian Township, Roger Mills County. There, one teacher taught children of different ages and grade levels together in the same room. Lola was a real-life Miss Beadle from Little House on the Prairie.

School terms were different then, and rural teachers often moved from one school to another between terms. Over the next several years, Lola appears to have taught at Mulberry, Blue Ridge, and Belleview. While teaching away from home, she stayed with families in the communities she served. Newspaper notices regularly documented her returning home when a school term ended.

In the spring of 1923, Lola began appearing in the local newspapers for an unfortunate reason. She was “sick with the flu” and unable to teach. A few weeks later, another notice reported that she was again too sick to “teach her room,” and a substitute had taken her place. It would be Lola’s last term before she married and moved to Colorado with her new husband.

Marriage often ended a woman’s teaching career. Some school districts had a “marriage bar,” requiring women to resign when they married or refusing to hire married women. This was already happening in Oklahoma. During the same 1922–23 school year that Lola taught her last term, an Oklahoma teacher lost her position simply because she married. She took the school district to court and won. Lola married that summer, left Oklahoma with Jesse, and as far as I can tell, never returned to the classroom.

In my mind, I am back in that bedroom, sitting among Lola’s lovely old clothes—the dropped waists, the prints and pleats. Had I been playing dress-up in the clothes of the young schoolteacher she once was?

I sat at her vanity and explored her jewelry and old cosmetics. Did she buy these extravagant things with her own money from teaching? I shoved my hands into a fur muff and wondered if the fur was real. Watching myself in the mirror, I wrapped scarves around my neck and tried on hat after hat. First a feather duster, and now a room full of dress-up clothes. Some of Lola’s clothes were small enough that I could actually wear them. So I helped myself.

The days ran together without a routine, so I made my own. I kept myself busy with Lola’s old clothes and soon started wearing them every day, recreating scenes from The Carol Burnett Show. Mark found his own world somewhere outside. He disappeared for hours at a time, then showed up dirty and hungry before taking off again. I think he spent much of his time with Grandpa French, but I don’t really know.

I'm often asked if my photographs are AI-generated. Some have been digitally enhanced, mostly to restore the original color. This one came from an old slide, but it looks as though it could have been taken yesterday. That's me with my feather duster, dressed in Grandma's clothes.

August became so hot you could hear the air. A swamp cooler sat in the window of the middle bedroom, and I often pulled up a chair and sang into the fan. It threw my voice back at me, distorted, while a cool mist blew against my face. Before long, my throat hurt, my sinuses ached, and I felt sick.

Unlike Lola’s overflowing closet, the closet in the middle bedroom was perfectly neat and held only Grandpa’s things. I wondered if he slept there, but I never saw him in the room or saw the bed unmade. Something about its neatness told me not to touch anything.

One bright Saturday, I woke to my dad’s sister, Aunt Bell, and her two children arriving for a quick visit from Clovis, New Mexico. It felt good to have someone else in the house with us. I paraded around in Lola’s old clothes, making everyone laugh, and somehow the cousins ended up playing wedding. Even Mark was happy for the company and stuck around to play. Out in the yard beneath a tree, he became the preacher and married me to my cousin Clayton. We planned the ceremony, rehearsed our parts, and laughed throughout the day. Just like that, we were out of the strange void and back to being kids.

That night, my cousin Jamie and I shared the biggest bed. Aunt Bell shook me awake sometime during the night and said I had a fever. Earlier, I had complained to Mark that I felt sick, but he diagnosed me with homesickness. Aunt Bell looked just like Grandma, only younger. She was a mom, so I figured she knew about fevers. I consented to having my temperature taken—until she tugged at my underwear.

Alarm! Alarm! My mother said nobody was allowed to touch my private parts. I explained that Mom always had me hold the thermometer under my tongue. Aunt Bell sighed and told me this was a different kind of thermometer. She tried anyway. I fought back. In the struggle, I scratched her with one of my dirty, unclipped nails. We finally compromised and put the thermometer under my arm.

The next morning, Aunt Bell was still mad about the scratch as they packed to leave. She found me in Grandma’s bedroom surrounded by piles of Lola’s clothes. I watched her eyes travel around the room, taking inventory of the mess, and I knew I was in trouble. She told me to clean it up and stop going through her mother’s things. Then they left. Whatever illness I had seemed to disappear overnight, but at least Aunt Bell left us groceries. For the rest of my life, I kept one eye on that woman.

That night, Mark and I stood in the kitchen watching each other eat Aunt Bell’s deli meat and hot dogs. We had a roof over our heads, food to eat, and beds to sleep in. We were surviving. Maybe with a little different supervision than we were used to, but our mother had taught us well. I could hear her voice in my head, protecting me and steering me away from most things that could cost me an arm or a leg.

Grandma came into the kitchen and looked at us. She announced she was going to take her constitution. I didn’t know what that was, but when she took off out the back door, you can be darn tootin’ I followed.

Below are a few of the newspaper clippings and records I found while researching Lola's years as a schoolteacher.