181. It’s Not Too Late, You’re Not Too Old

Nora tells the story of her grandmother Mary Jane, and how she graduated from college at 82. 

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Nora McInerny: My grandmother Mary Jane was an artist, but she didn’t know that until the second half of her life, when her husband and the father of her nine surviving children (also known as my Grandpa Bill) died suddenly of a stroke or maybe something else…I was a child and didn’t ask a lot of specifics.

They’d just moved their lives from the city of Minneapolis to teeny tiny Outing, Minnesota, to a log cabin my grandpa had inherited from his uncle, a Catholic Priest who I am realizing just now in this moment was supposed to have taken a vow of poverty forbidding him from owning property??

Winters in Northern Minnesota are the stuff of legends and nightmares: yards of snow piling up against your home, barricading you within it. Temperatures that drop so far below zero it feels fake to even write it out. (-20?? Fahrenheit?? See?? Feels fake!).

I assumed my grandmother would move back down to the city, to be near her children and her 28 grandchildren (that number also feels fake, but it is not).

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I assumed wrong. Grandma stayed up North, in that little cabin with a half-bath and a tin shower stall in the basement. She spent her summers tending to a garden that fed us every time we visited, and sent us home to the city with jars of applesauce we treasured like it was gold. She taught us to throw clay, pinch pots, fire and glaze our little treasures. She praised our efforts, and smashed our failures to create mosaics.

At Christmas, she’d gift us with a pair of pajamas she’d sewn in that barely heated basement, and head back up North alone to her pottery, her painting, herself.

When decided she wanted to finish the degree she’d abandoned in 1936, she started with classes at her community college, and then enrolled in the University of Minnesota, which meant 300 miles round-trip twice a week to attend classes. When she graduated with her degree in Fine Arts at age 82, it was 64 years after she’d had to withdraw for financial reasons.

I remember seeing this photo and saying “you’re so skinny!” My grandma replied, “it was The Depression, we were starving.” Well then.

It was not too late for her, and she was not too old.

I don’t want to create fan fiction out of my grandma’s life. I don’t know if she spent her decades raising children pining for the life she may have had if she’d had the option of finishing her education before becoming an octogenarian. I don’t know that I am living her wildest dream; hunched over a keyboard while my husband— a stay-at-home-parent like Mary Jane— tends to and feeds our children and pays our bills on time.

I do know that fourteen years after her death, my daughter and I wear her aprons when we cook. My children and I eat from the bowls she made.

Artists don’t exist in a vacuum; they exist in response to their environment. My grandma was an artist when she was sewing a homecoming dress for her oldest daughter, when she was walking beside me through her garden, teaching me to tell the weeds from the seedlings, when she boiled down the summer’s raspberries into winter’s jam. My grandmother’s art wasn’t a spontaneous superbloom in a fallow field; it was just another bud opening it’s petals.

She was always an artist. Maybe you are, too.