| This account features our paternal grandmother, Olive, or "Ollie" as she was known to her friends. She was VERY Irish and very intelligent and creative. One thing I inherited from her is my wacky sense of humor. During her kid years, she was planning to become a Nun. Whoa... I'm sure glad she didn't or I wouldn't be here now! (A lot of people who have been around me over the years wished she HAD become a Nun! Well, be that as it may... according to her account, when she was very young, she went through a tornado, which resulted in her life-long severe phobia of storms of ANY KIND! When she retired from Miami University, she returned to live with us at the farm when Tim and I were about 14 as I recall. EVERY time there was a summer thunderstorm, she would continually pace all around the house muttering to herself while sprinkling "holy water" all over everything. This, I'm sure was the result of her early Catholic training. One time I asked her what "holy water" was and where it came from (I figured it must have come from an eternal spring at the Vatican or something). She said it was water that had been blessed by a priest. She kept it in a clear glass bottle (that looked like a shampoo bottle) with a green cap. Each summer after the first 1 or 2 thunderstorms, her "holy water" supply would be very low. She remedied this by going to the kitchen faucet and refilling the bottle! We always wondered just how much "blessing" and "holy" there was in the bottle after being diluted so much over the years! Well, there must have been some diluted blessing left because we never saw any tornados heading our way. Once and a while Tim and/or I would tease her during a storm and say, "Wow, look at that big tornado coming toward us!" She would then go berserk and yell, "Head for the basement"! It's too bad I didn't have that bottle of "Diluted Holy Water" years later when I was in the Navy and went through a hurricane in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in a minesweeper! |
