Grandma Jergens comes to visit

Photo by Les Magee

The news was in the air: grandma was coming to visit! I thought, who? I had no idea what “grandma” meant and the thought that mom had ever been a little girl was strange to me. At two or three, I had not met any of my grandparents, but called other American adults in our lives “aunt” and “uncle”; they had become our surrogate family.