By John Pierre

As we get older, it's kinda natural to look back on our lives and marvel at the way things have changed as the decades have whooshed by.

I can't help but think of my grandma, Daisy Belle, who came to the Northwest in a covered wagonin 1880when she was 8 years old and lived to 94.

The family endured a many-months-long trip from Kansas to Tumwater (just outside of Olympia), which was, at the time, hailed as the official end of the northern branch of the Oregon Trail.

She was a great storyteller. One of her stories had to do with her younger brother, Sidney, who talked with a lisp. He would have called himself Thidney. When the wagon train made camp on the prairie where there were no trees, children were sent out to gather dried cow chips or buffalo chips for the fire.

Sidney came back to camp late one afternoon and asked, "Ith the thoft oneth OK?"

I think of the many changes she saw during her life. From a horse-drawn covered wagon to automobiles, radio, television andmen in space. She just barely missed a man walking on the moon.

Grandma (she was "Grammie" to us) Daisy Belle outlived three husbands. My grandfather, who died when my father was only 17; an ex-Oklahoma deputy sheriff (Al Goldsby) who had snow-white hair and stood 6-feet 4-inches in his stocking feet was the grandpa I knew and grew up with. It was said that earlier hewas a deputy U.S. Marshal working for "Hanging Judge" Parker in Fort Smith, Arkansas, at the turn of the "last" century.

Grammie wasn'tquite 5 feettall, but she ruled the roost and Daddy Al (that's what everyone called him) pretty much did her bidding.

When Daddy Al died after falling off a barn roof when he was in his late 80s,she acquired athird and last husband. He was on his last legs when she married him, and shemanaged topack him back and forth from his bed to the easy chair daily.

After he died, she lived alone in a small cottage just outside Olympia, where my kids were privileged to meet her and listen to her tales. Somebody asked her if she wasn't afraid to be all alone. She replied, "No if someone carried me away in the middle of the night, they'd bring me back come daylight."

Her pioneer family, (including my father)learned to make music as their only source of entertainment. Most of them became proficient with stringed instruments and playedand sangat barn dances, in church or at home.

One of them would thump on a "bull fiddle" (that's a stand-up bass)while another sawed away on a fiddle held in the crook of the arm. There were always "geetars" and "potato bug" mandolins and banjos involved. Grammie could always be counted on to pound the daylights out of a piano.

That music is one of my special memories as I grow older amidst the myriad conveniences and disgusting TVwe are subjected to daily.