Lauranna
Recently I lost my grandmother, my last remaining grandparent, and I was asked to write a little life sketch, no more than two pages that could be photocopied front and back on a single sheet of paper, which is really an absurd task. How can anyone pretend to condense 100 years of living into a few drips of ink? How could anyone know my grandma without understanding that she regularly vacuumed her oven to remove the toast crumbs, or that she scolded me for not schooling my face to look pleasant in public, even if I was tired and thought I was alone.
In college she came to visit and bring my sewing machine, and when my boyfriend saw her lugging the heavy metal thing up the stairs, he tried to take it from her. “No,” she said, “I’ve carried many a sewing machine,” and up she came to the top floor. Years later I called her to get the details on canning chicken breast. “It will be easier if I just come to you” she said in her scratchy voice. It was an hour and a half drive, but come she did, and we stood in my kitchen bottling quarts and quarts of delicious chicken as she tutored me in the mysteries of my pressure canner.
How could you know her without knowing she drove her car until she was 92, though the last few years she planned her routes so she only had to make right turns. Unfortunately, at 92 her eyes began to fail and she had to give up her car. One day her son Fred walked in to find her struggling to read a recipe with a magnifying glass. “Poor Zed,” she said without irony,“ she’s blind and she loves chocolate cake. If you could be my eyes, I can make her one.” Eventually, Fred had to read her all her mail, including the official letter revoking her driving privileges due to age. “Well, that’s too bad,” she said wryly, “I’m deaf and blind, but at least I could drive.”
Grandma had 9 children, 31 grandchildren, 84 great-grandchildren, and 8 great-great grandchildren. For her funeral most of those 132 people converged in Richmond, Utah, some traveling long distances for no other purpose than to honor her, though my few shabby pages cannot truly demonstrate why. By worldly standards she had nothing to offer. She was never rich, nor did she ever hold a big job, get a college education, travel the world, write a book, or paint a masterpiece. Her life was largely circumscribed by small towns in farming communities where the cows outvoted the humans. Yet on the day of the funeral that church was full. Even after all these years with so many of her friends and loved ones long dead, people still came to pay their respects to a woman whose life had meaning long after she had ceased to understand why herself. She kept saying, “I think I’m mostly around to annoy my kids.”
A few months later she told me, “I used to say ‘I feel like I’m a hundred years old,’” adding bewilderedly, “I don’t remember how I felt.” In my youth, I do remember her saying that many times after a long or stressful day, but step by sometimes painful step, she kept going. Having survived breast cancer, eight-bypass heart surgery, and Covid (twice), she dryly complained, “I don’t know what’s going to get me out of here.” At her 100th birthday party in July, hundreds of people sang her Happy Birthday, and at the end she called out “And may there not be any more!”
I know, it sounds like dreadful gallows humor, but everyone laughed because she’s hilarious. But more than that, because of her, most of those people firmly believe in life after death, that we are still ourselves, and that a glorious reunion awaited her: her husband, Fred, her eldest daughter, Mary, her parents, several siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and dear friends, not to mention God and Christ themselves.
Think about that a minute, let it sink in. So many people have a shared belief because of the powerful teachings and testimony of one small town woman delivered without eloquence in a million little drips flipped and splattered among vacuums, ovens, sewing machines, and chicken. How could I ever convey that in two little pages? I failed, of course, but my intended audience understood because they each filled in the backstory for themselves.
I wish Grandma had obliged us by writing down her life story, but she was far too busy yanking an ironed apron over her wrinkled body and cooking for the sick and the elderly. Absent her own words, I had to rummage through the stories of others, mining for the veins where her story crosshatched theirs, plotting points and revealing patterns. Meanwhile, her youngest daughter Laura’s children cleverly boiled into five words the bedrock philosophy and action that drove her century of life: “Keep the Commandments” and “Be Useful.” Talking to them first would have saved me a lot of time.
Lauranna Bradshaw was born at home on July 17, 1923 in Egin, Idaho into a household with no indoor bathroom, where lye soap was homemade, and weekly ironing was accomplished with heavy irons heated on a coal and woodburning stove. Her father, George Bradshaw, was a farmer who battled alcoholism until late in life, and her mother, Jennie Weaver Bradshaw, never let a little thing like poverty and primitive conditions interfere with scoured floors and snowy dish towels. Jennie’s high standards and dynamic work ethic took firm root in young Lauranna who decades later would return to Utah after serving an 18-month senior family history mission in California, only to pop up at 6:00 the first morning home and start scrubbing the tracks of her windows.
The second of seven children, Lauranna grew up poor during the Great Depression. She learned to work like a plow horse, loved spending time with her sisters and listening to radio shows when the family eventually got a used radio and a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling in each room. Growing up with so few modern conveniences, it is ironic that electricity should introduce her to her future husband, Fredrick Porter who had to keep coming into her workplace at Utah Power and Light as he spearheaded bringing electricity to his own small farming community of Ora, Idaho.
Lauranna and Fred married on October 31, 1943. Soon they were expecting their first child, Mary, at the same time the Navy decided to send Fred to Harvard to study communications and the brand-new, super-secret radar technology. Consequently, the young bride from Egin gave birth to my mother in Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from the Harvard Yard. Grandma didn’t talk much about the war years, but I remember she once pulled out a white lace tablecloth and said Fred had brought it to her from China, adding quietly, “Fred would go off and I never knew if I’d ever see him again.” She said it with her signature shoot-straight practicality, but I could see a bigger story lurked behind her eyes and I stupidly wasted my chance to ask. Our clue to how she handled it is knowing that when her son Freddy was sent to fight in Vietnam, she fasted and prayed every week for his safety and well-being. She served as hard as she could with both her hands, then worked her faith to carry the rest of the load.
Lauranna and Fred started their married life in Ashton, Idaho, moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, then to St. Anthony, Idaho where she lived out the war in a little apartment with baby Mary. When Fred returned from the war, they took advantage of the G.I. Bill and moved to Logan, Utah for his master’s program at Utah State University. They also lived in Eugene, Oregon during Fred’s Ph.D program before finally settling down to raise their burgeoning family in Rigby, Idaho, with summers spent on the farm in Ora in a basement house with many kids and no indoor bathroom, an astonishing feat for such a careful and persnickety personality. Children appeared in rapid succession, Mary in 1945, Barbara in 1946, Jeanne in 1947, Fred in 1949, Louise in 1950, Maxine in 1952, Jeff in 1955, and Doug in 1956. Eight appeared to be the complete set, until Barbara’s wedding. When Barbara went to the photographer’s studio to see her wedding photos, his wife looked over his shoulder and said, “Good Heavens, Gail, you’ve got Lauranna looking pregnant.” Laura was born in 1969, my aunt at birth. In 1973 they moved to their home in Richmond, Utah where they spent their retirement.
Like her mother, Lauranna was a fabulous cook with a genius for stretching resources through sheer effort of will. Maxine remembers believing her mother didn’t sleep during canning season because she went to bed seeing her canning in her old blue housedress, then awakened to find her in the same old dress putting up just one more batch before everything had to be cleared so she could make breakfast from scratch in that postage stamp kitchen. But her efforts extended far beyond her own large family. Money was perpetually tight, yet her children remember that tramps needing a meal were never sent away empty handed, and Laura recalled “coming home many times to delicious food I was told not to touch because she had made it for someone in need.” Laura was also regularly reminded that “when I walked into church each week, it was important to speak to the widows sitting on the back row, never just walking by as if I didn’t see them there.”
Charity was part and parcel with Lauranna’s testimony, and she taught her children to love the Lord and stand firm in the gospel both by her words and by her example. Laura wrote, “As a teenager I walked down the hall and caught mom on her knees praying many times. I knew it was a source of strength for her, and I wanted to learn it myself.” Barbara told of a time her teenage self approached her mother wondering whether her young testimony was real or just formed of the “expected.” Lauranna didn’t gear up and preach a sermon. “Her answer that day as we sat on the bed was to ask me if I paid my tithing willingly. She said that if I was happy and willing to pay my tithing, it was pretty likely that I had the beginnings of a testimony.” Doug talked about benefitting too, even during his, uhm, less auspicious days. “She never deviated from her integrity, ever,” he said. One day he was trying to tell her a little truth according to Doug that she could recount should anyone of the badge-wearing variety inquire, but it was no good. “I wouldn’t risk my salvation by telling anyone the story the way it was just told to me,” she said. He didn’t describe her expression, but I bet her mouth was set in that way she had, with a wry edge of stink-eye for emphasis.
Unfortunately, we do not have Lauranna’s own words, but her children were watching all these decades, and in the end, it is Doug who will bear her final testimony. “Her daily life and activities were always tethered to the teachings of the gospel, and it came naturally for her to remind all of us that that was the only safe path for any of us to follow. She did exactly that, took her own advice and at the end she won her race. She is a success story . . . I believe her prayers and her faith were more powerful than any other person that I know, and they are even more powerful now. Simple, unvarnished and straightforward. She was always as true as steel in her example and her devotion to the Lord and the gospel.”
Doug is right, she did win her race, and at the finish she would have found God who I suspect looked very like an old and familiar friend, looking at her with great love and welcome, and needing her help to teach the spirits who had gone before. To which she probably replied, “I thought it would be easier if I just came to you.”