Grandma Olive

My grandmother - Olive K. Smith - passed away last year. She is dearly missed. Grandma Olive was the clear matriarch of the family and a great role-model for her family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. She touched many lives.

My aunt, Monica Gayle (Aunty Kits) , recited a wonderful remembrance at the funeral last year, which I am including below. Aunty Kits, this was truly excellent.

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Today, we celebrate the life of Olive Kathleen Smith. Proud to call her mother, mother-in-law, grandmother, great-grandmother, sister, and sister-in-law are: Brent, Monica, Trevor, Nicola, Lincoln, Veveca, Barbara, Althea, Sydney, Lesley, Gary, Gavin, Craig, Sacha, Karyn, Keri, Tessa, Nesa, Tamii, Luc, Iris, Eunice, Ettie, Minetta and Elsa.

Veveca and Iris could not be here today. Iris asks that we be happy for her sister as she takes her rest.

Olive Kathleen Smith nee Stewart was the thirteenth child born to Benjamin and Eugena Stewart. She came into the world on October 16th, 1916. She was by all accounts a happy child and by her own confession a mischievous one. She learned about responsibility and work early in life, but never lost her sense of fun.

As a young woman she married Samuel Smith and formed a partnership that endured for 61 ½ years. Sam predeceased her in 2002. The union produced four children Brent, Monica, Trevor, and Nicola but Aunt Olive mothered two others- Lincoln and Veveca

She spent her youth at Marion in Donegal, St. Elizabeth. After her marriage she lived at Brighton, St. Elizabeth until she moved to Kingston in 1955.

If you asked my mother how she was, if she was alright, she would invariably answer, “I’m OK in name and nature.” Today I will show you a woman who was teacher, nurturer, chief executive officer, and philosopher all rolled into one. Travel with me and see a lady who was neither ordinary nor simple….. a business woman, a renaissance woman, a God-fearing woman. She was mentor, reader, cricket enthusiast, cook, baker, gardener, sister and friend. This matriarch was first and last our mother and she was more than Ok in name and nature.

She had no letters behind her name and she did not need them. I have conferred many titles on her that were integral to her. She was hardly ever just one in isolation. Her essence is wrapped up in them all collectively.

Her husband Sam introduced her to business and she excelled at it. She brought to it her astuteness as well as her lively, friendly manner. In the early years at Brighton, St. Elizabeth, her shop was a hub of activity. The people in the community shared more than moments of their time doing the necessary shopping. They shared pieces of their lives. Miss Olive, they called her. Everybody knew Miss Olive…. the ministers at church, the politicians, the road workers. She was central to their inter-connectedness.

She always drew people to her because she was interested in them.

So many interesting things I remember. So many stories.

Brain racing faster than tongue could utter, my mother in her inimitable way would work her way through the names of her children before she got to the one she wanted- Lincoln, Brent, Nicky, Trevor! Then stamping her foot- “Trevor, you know it’s you I mean!” Then would come her laughter and the shared memory that her own mother used to do the same thing.

My mother included you in the things she did. If you were there and she was baking or cooking, you were involved in it; grating the zest of limes, breaking eggs or fetching something or other for her, if you could remember which of the five things she was impatiently awaiting. She loved family and family gatherings and she could spread a delightfully mouth- watering table that was also a visual feast. Ever the teacher, she made sure that we learned, so that we would not later shame her. Was she a better baker, or a better cook? She was marvelous at both.

Energy, my mother had energy. She moved quickly. When we were younger we had to work to keep up with her. In her eighties she was still a force to be reckoned with.

Her thoughts often outpaced her words, but she had a fantastic brain. She could cipher and do calculations in her head. Paper and pencil were her calculators. She was a voracious reader. She read widely, broadening her experience in this way. During her Brighton days, my mother had had the good fortune of being a postal reader. The Library service routinely selected and mailed books to readers who lived in outlying districts. She had the chance to read books that some only see on University reading lists. I recall such reading lists and knowing how fond my mother was of Jane Austin and of Pride and Prejudice. I once shared that that was part of my required reading. “That’s one of my favorites,” she said…”that Darcy” naming one of the characters. “I’ve read that book at least four times.” Wonderful!.....so she had to enjoy Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte too? She had read their novels and remembered them. Her passion for reading was just that, a passion and she was unperturbed by the fact that she may have been reading the classics of literature. No limits. She was just being and doing what seemed natural.

She was incredibly smart with words. Crosswords and word puzzles were her forte. Pick up any newspaper at home and you would find the crossword, completed in ink. Challenge her to Scrabble or Boggle at your own peril. She even made sense out of the Jumbleword puzzles.

My mother was very good at making sense out of things. Not one to sit idly by and wring her hands, she was a problem-solver. She found solutions. As chief executive officer (CEO) of her home and business my mother was at her pragmatic best.

While she had her store on Windward Road, ( a store called Renaissance), she would go to work leaving the care of her home to an able household helper who had moved from St. Elizabeth to Kingston with us. This state of affairs progressed in a satisfactory manner for a long while until the trusted helper left to pursue other avenues. My mother hired a series of replacements and after dealing with a long litany of woes and excuses for substandard performance, my mother had had enough. She realized that the situation was untenable and that drastic changes were necessary. This is when our mother, the CEO introduced Thor. She used Thor to teach us many valuable lessons. You could probably find some of them in textbooks on Business Management.

Back to Thor… Thor was powerful and changed our lives. Thor was a washing machine. At that time in Jamaica, washing machines were not in every home. I remember that Thor even had a pedal which when activated would heat water in the machine. So Thor would take care of the laundry- was that enough? My mother had a plan. She knew what was needed to run a household… cleaning, cooking, doing the dishes, washing, and ironing. She designated those tasks to her children. Her expectations were that the tasks would be done and done well, and so she did not micro-manage. Her children learned to negotiate with each other. They learned about task-sharing and task-swapping, and they learned that the more efficient they were, the more time they would have for other pursuits.

This Renaissance woman did not believe in gender specific tasks… no woman’s work/man’s work distinctions for her. She also believed that even the youngest could help. We may have viewed Nicky as our morale booster. She felt that she was in charge of dusting. Lincoln could and can cook. Brent used to know how to seriously iron a shirt and he was the one responsible for going to King Street on a Saturday morning to buy flowers for the house. Trevor and I were multi-taskers. I did more cooking than he did, but I know that we were responsible for breaking a dish or two, here and there.

Today as adults, Nicky and Veveca included, we have her stamp of approval in the home-making arena. She would say that our skills are more than ok. When we reminisce about this time, we are all grateful and we remember the togetherness rather than the work.

The flowers. Your house was clean and your home had flowers in it.

My mother was a gardener. She took pride in her garden. She had an eye for the plants she selected and planted. She had the proverbial green thumb. My mother’s vases were always filled with flowers or greenery of some kind.

She tells a story that is germane to her life and to her philosophy of being. A very good friend once visited her and saw an empty vase on a table and asked “Olive, is that a vase?” When she replied that it was, he asked her why she wasn’t using it for its purpose. That friend was Ivan Shaw, godfather to one of her children, and she would say of him- “He made you want to be better”. I believe that the same can be said of her. Olive Kathleen, the nurturer, the mentor, encouraged those around her to raise the level of their expectations, to fill up the vessel, the vase, with their talents and gifts.

She had an eye for colour and texture, for fabrics and fashion, for the merchandise that would please her customers and keep them coming back for quality and service. Miss Olive always delivered on these at the Renaissance on Windward Road, and when she outgrew that, at Olive’s in Spanish Town. She knew that the mundane had its place, but she preferred her style to make a statement, to be more than just okay….it had to “cut a dash”- to use her own words.

She also had a look, and here I do not mean her personal style, but a look that banished misbehavior and restored good sense to would be delinquents. She always believed that good manners were a necessity and taught us to do the right things even when no one was looking. We believed, as children, that she had eyes in the back of her head. She always seemed to sense when her presence would stave off some misdeed. In later years, we realized that there were no eyes in the back of her head, but rather a very good memory of some of her youthful escapades.

Most Jamaicans can relate to the summer ritual with the castor oil. Our mother would try to sweeten the experience by offering a choice of soft drinks or an orange for the post-traumatic experience, but we noticed that she never left our sides until she had a clean spoon and the castor oil had vanished. You see, she remembered how she may have made the castor oil vanish, once.

Olive Kathleen was a God-fearing woman. She relied on her faith through trials and triumphs. She would say,” You just need to focus on God, and feel Jesus in your heart.” She did not take on airs of piety, she simply referred to herself as a “trying sinner”. My mother never learned how to dissemble. She was open and frank. She would tell you what she liked and didn’t like. She did try to be more tactful over the years. She did not bear grudges either. She was interested in seemingly everything. She loved her grandchildren and they loved her. The tables turned a bit with them scolding her, “Grandma.” You see, they had learned that one word, one look, was sufficient. Gavin between the kiss and the hug would call her “troublemaker”. The grand-daughters bore her, shall we say, scrutiny with good grace even when it became a little, shall we say, “cheeky”.

They all loved her special cherry drink… the one she made from the fruit of the cherry tree growing in the backyard. She beamed all over them with pride when they wanted more. Her other famous brew, they also loved, that punch, which they called the “pink thing”. I am not sure who gets credit for that name, but somehow, inadvertently or not, one of the youngsters got a taste. That youngster later came to grandma for a drink. I don’t know what drink she offered, but she was redirected to the- “the pink thing” … Whenever the “pink thing” was mentioned she would put on her innocent, don’t blame me look, as she chuckled inside.

She was proud of them all, and no less so of her great-grandson, Luc. I remember when Luc was a toddler that he came to visit. Grandma Olive hugged him, cuddled him a bit, and wanting him to know that they were related by blood, she asked him if he could smell the blood. “Smell the blood?” she questioned, and each time she said that, Baby Luc would touch his nose as if to say- I smell it. Those were precious moments.

My mother always loved cricket, and was able to devote more time to it after she retired. She has been known to wake up early and stay up late to watch and listen. She knew the teams, the players, their strengths and weaknesses. She had her favorites. If asked, she could have given the selectors advice. She remained a cricket fan through victory and heartbreak. On one particularly trying Sunday …cricketwise, she expressed her fervent hope that the good Lord would forgive her because her mind had wandered to the cricket during the sermon.

Olive Kathleen Smith was a woman full of passion and humanity.