"Grandma Los," from CRC Family Portrait (ii)

I had two objectives in all those interviews and all those stories: first, I wanted to find out as much as I could about the subject--life, profession, character; second, I wanted to know what they thought of the denomination of which they were a part. The CRC was greatly more "ethnic" back then, much more of a family. As I remember, that question--"So what do you think about the church?"--made sense to everyone I asked, including this 80-year-old matriarch, as you will discover.

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During the Thirties, Pete and Hattie spend altogether too much good farming time cleaning up dust from the kitchen, shaking it out of the quilts, spanking it out of the children’s clothes, night after night—every night a pail full from inside the home. "We saw it coming when we left church one Sunday. It looked maybe like rain," she says. "I had left my children's clothes on the bed, you know, for them to change after church. When I came upstairs, I could barely see them on the bed, already there was so much dust." It was new to them and therefore scary, because they didn't know what was happening.

Soon they knew. Dust took over the farm like a snarling landlord, choking machinery, blinding the livestock. South Dakota became a dust bowl.

They watched as grasshoppers devoured crops made frail by drought and raging prairie winds. “It was over 100 degrees in March,” she says. “And the land had been so good before. We didn’t know what was happening. The hoppers ate everything later, even the onions in the ground."

They were rescued by Roosevelt's New Deal, Pete given jobs that brought them enough money for clothes and food for their growing family.

The Los family lived with the Sioux on the Rosebud Reservation. They made friends with dark-skinned people with non-Frisian names like No Good. They traded bread and butter, eggs and meat, for the Indians' government surplus handouts, clothing that seemed ridiculous to the Indians: wool army coats, buckle boots, hats. They watched other whites, even whites from their own church, take advantage of the Sioux: steal the horses the Indians let run and cheat them out of what they deserved for the fence posts they would cut from the river and bring up to the farmers for trade.

While Pete's Dutch nephews risked their lives hiding from conscription into Hitler's Nazi army, the Los family here in America gave up a son-and-brother to the Allied war effort. Frank, twenty-five, the second of the boys, already the father of two children, was killed in December of 1944, the month of his birthday, very soon after digging his first foxhole in European earth. The life of Hattie Los is a course in American history.

Hattie Los has lived through what she has because she's strong. She's a powerful woman, even today in a wheelchair. Her shoulders are broad and square, her arms still thick as heavy branches. Her hair is white, and little wisps of silver curl out from beneath the hair net over the back of her head. Her eyes are clear and fresh behind the rectangular glasses she wears when she reads from the pile of books lying next to her big soft chair. And her features, her nose and mouth, seem almost muscular-the kind of face, the kind of woman, really, who could live on the plains in the very bad years, the kind of woman who could love on the plains in the very bad years.

"I can cry easy," she says, "both from being sad and being happy." Not long ago, in one Sunday morning service, Grandma Los saw three grandchildren bap­tized and two make public profession of faith. "I was filled up with joy," she says. "I could have cried." The threat of tears is in her eyes when she remembers that Sunday, but the threat's there, too, the moment she mentions those of her family who don't care for the church. "I can cry easy," she says again, but when she tells her stories, one realizes that easy is not the right word. Grandma Los was a farm wife, a South Dakota prairie woman, a strong Frisian, a mother who delivered seven of her own nine children with the help of her husband alone. Grandma Los feels deeply, but doesn't cry easily.

"But it hurts," she says, when she talks of those other grandchildren, brought up in the church, graduated from the local Christian school, former students at denominational colleges, those grandchildren today rejecting the church, even neglecting their Lord. She says it hurts her that her grandchildren can go to Calvin or Dordt and then not care. She prays for the colleges. She says that the church is only as strong as our colleges. "It starts in the colleges," she says, her hands out in front of her, constantly moving. 'They got to teach the right principles, the right religion," she says, even her rheumatic shoulders pumping when she speaks.

"Maybe I'm here yet to pray for my grandchildren," .be explains, her smile brightening again. "That's my privilege.''

Perhaps every Christian Reformed church doesn't have a Grandma Los. If so, then some are not so blessed as Delavan.

Not so much different from Grandma Los really. She faces no such winter. She faces only eternal spring, better than the warmest May afternoon in Delavan. She knows it. And that's what lights her smile, a smile of more than eighty years of life. 

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Writers are carpetbaggers. We ride in and out, make ourselves comfortable in other people's lives, scribble down what we find interesting, then leave to some basement carrel to do our work. 

Consider this a confession, something good for the soul. For several years after the afternoon I spent with her, I received a Christmas card from Grandma Los. Each time, she'd wish me and my family a blessed Christmas, and then she'd say, "Now you should stop by for coffee again sometime." 

She lived a couple hours away from where we lived back then, and I was busy--busy, busy, busy. It's easy for me to say now, but I really should have visited, stopped by for coffee and a goodie.

Grandma Los died in 1989.