My Grandma Sasse

My Grandma Sasse lived in a huge two-story house! It was so big that she didn’t use or heat five upstairs rooms! The house also had a full basement, two stairways, and bay windows! To a small child who lived in a small farmhouse, it seemed like a castle!

My grandma had pure white hair, but she kept a lock of her bright red hair in a glass dish on her dresser. If she had the temper of a redhead, I never was aware of it. The worse thing that I ever heard her say was “fiddlesticks!”

She didn’t eat much but she enjoyed strange sweet things. Peanut butter on a hot Pop Tart from the toaster was a favorite of hers!

She always had a jigsaw puzzle laid out on a table. Also, Monopoly and cards were popular games during my visits. For hours we would play dominoes and I would also build skyscraper buildings with those old black wooden blocks, seeing how high I could stack them before they would topple down! I still have those dominos in my possession yet today.

Grandma would always give me $2.00 for my birthday present and $5.00 at Christmas. One December she gave my five girl cousins and me our gift in silver dollars. How I wish I had kept them!

Grandma Sasse would quite often call me “Mr. Sasse”, probably because I was her only grandson. I can recall asking her once, “Grandma, did you know that BS are your initials?” She only laughed and at the time, I “didn’t get it!” I can also recall that later I would mow her yard and pick up her mail at the post office.

Bertha Mae “Black” Sasse my last grandparent, passed away in 1966 when I was fifteen years old. Now as an adult, I occasionally drive past her large old house. It doesn’t look as big now and it has been remodeled several times inside. But I still enjoy driving by and remembering.

Since my wife’s family has a history of red hair and my daughter married a redhead, perhaps someday I’ll have a redheaded grandchild. But if I do I bet she won’t be named Bertha! But who knows what future lurks in the Sasse Files?