I never had a conversation with my maternal grandmother, never knew what she was thinking, what her full life story had been. I took her inability to speak English for granted, never really wondering what thoughts and stories lay behind her sweet face. In my youth I was busy with learning about the world and myself. It was not until after she had died that I began to contemplate her existence. Too late I wanted to know more about her than the superficial portrait of a kind woman bearing cups of heavily sugared coffee. Sadly while she was alive I only truly knew that I felt quite comfortable and loved around her even though she and I never once had any kind of conversation. 

My mother adored her mother. She spoke of her in reverential terms as the ultimate purveyor of love and sacrifice. Mama told stories of her mother performing miracles in the kitchen to feed her eight children during the Great Depression, often saving the bones for herself when the fare was lean. Somehow it never occurred to me to ask for more details the mystery of Grandma until it was almost too late to piece together a more complete biography of her life.Perhaps all I really needed to know about my maternal grandmother was the sweetness that I felt in her presence, but I was determined to find out more. 

Long after my grandmother had died in the late nineteen seventies I realized the importance of her presence within the family. There was a kind of hole in the once dependable fabric of our family in her absence, a missing piece that seemed to be strange given that she had always been so quiet and unassuming. I began to ask questions and do research that helped me to develop a portrait of her that was more complex than I might have imagine. 

I had only known my grandmother as Mary Ulrich from Czechoslovakia. I found that her maiden name was Maria Bartakovic and that she was born in the Trencin area of Austria Hungary in 1890, the daughter of Andreas and Maria. She was baptized as a Catholic in that same year in Cachtice according to church records. After that her life is a cipher until she made a journey to Galveston, Texas in 1913 to meet her husband Pavel Uhrick who had preceded her the year before. 

My Aunt Valeria has told her daughter that Maria worked at a farm known as Magnolia Park alongside her husband when she first came to America. The place which was named for its native magnolia trees was located near what is now known as the Houston Ship Channel just east of downtown Houston. Within a year of arriving she gave birth to her first child, William, but continued working at various jobs that included cleaning office buildings at night and clerking at a bakery. From what my aunt recalls, her mother spoke English enough at the time to converse with others. When she lost that ability seems to have gone unnoticed by her children. 

My grandmother must have been an attractive woman with her black hair and blue eyes. My aunt revealed that while Grandma was working in the evenings her boss began to harass her. When she told my grandfather he insisted that she quit. Somehow I had never thought of the chubby woman who was my grandmother as being the object of a man’s unwanted attention, but given how attractive all of her children were, she most certainly must have been stunning herself.

Eventually my grandmother had a succession of births that gave her ten children. Sadly one of the babies died so quickly after birth that he remained unnamed. Another son, Stephen, lived for six months before succumbing to his inability to properly process food. Of the eight children who lived, four were boys and four were girls. My mother was the youngest of the brood. 

When my mother was still a toddler Grandma had a mental breakdown. Given that she had carried and birthed ten children from 1914 to 1926 with no medical care it is little wonder that she succumbed to the rollercoaster of hormonal changes that must have affected her. I can only imagine how tired and run down she must have been. I know that her absence had a profound impact on my mother. I was one of the few things that she ever revealed about her childhood.  

I suspect that my grandmother was also traumatized by her experienced in a hospital. From the time that she returned to her family in about 1931 until she died in 1977, she only left her home once when her appendix burst. She also never spoke English again. Her whole world would be encapsulated inside her house with her children and grandchildren buzzing around her.

The grandmother that I knew padded around her tiny home in her bare feet unless it was a particularly cold day when she grudgingly donned warm slippers. She quietly tended her garden and made her daily pot of coffee. She mopped her wooden floors each morning as if by habit and did little more. Much of her time was spent sitting in her preferred chair in the corner of her living room watching her children and grandchildren like a sphinx. What she was thinking was an enigma. The extent of her communication was to refer to anyone who entered her home as either “pretty boy” or “pretty girl.”

She was nonetheless the perfect hostess, almost instantly serving cups of weak coffee fortified with sugar and milk to anyone who entered her house, including small children. I loved that brew because it felt like sipping love to me. The smile on her face as she presented her offering told me all that I needed to know about how much she cared about all of us. 

Maria Bartacovic Uhrick must have been a beautiful young girl with her dark black hair arranged in a braid and pale blue eyes that were always so calm and comforting. She would grow into an old woman with a figure like an apple and streaks of gray in her hair. Her face was wrinkled and her hands were care worn from digging in her yard and performing countless chores. She had laid down on the floor of her home ten times and given birth more often than not without any help. She raised a motley crew in a tiny space and all of them would love her deeply and make her proud. 

I suppose that there was a time when I thought that Maria Uhrick was just a simple woman. I would have to encounter the trials of being a woman to fully appreciate how remarkable she actually was. I suppose that I know all that I really need to know about her now even as I thirst for just a tiny bit more information to fully uncover her mystery. Somehow I think that I should simply be content with now being able to infer the contents of her mind. She was brave and hardworking and content to play the most important role that anyone might tackle. She loved.