First Daughter, Still Standing

This writing is in draft stage. As my life brings me new understandings of myself I continue to weave those understandings into my writing. 

 Truth does not abandon the hearts that fly free.

Stories of my mother, my grandmothers, and their influence on who I am becoming.

My mother, Velda Mae Bonner Kolhs, was a woman of her own mind and heart. Her mother, Juanita Airington Kohls, passed away when mom was only four years old. The early death left behind stories that unfortunately took years to unfold and yet to be told to me years into my mother's elderhood. My father’s mother, Audrey Mae Stanton Bonner, was with us until 1976. I was a young mother and 28 years old when she passed. Known as Deedee mom to her family, I had the privilege of knowing her and spending a great deal of time with her while I was growing up and all throughout my early adult life. I am witness to this somewhat grievous and hidden love. Offered as a gift, and in their own individual capacity, for as long as they walked this earth. I  carry their love deep in my heart and soul. 

I am the first daughter still standing.  

These are my stories.

I will first share a little about myself. Then I will share about my mother, what I have learned from her, as her first daughter, what I have learned about my grandmother Juanita's passing so early in my mother's life and how their history came to be a focus the whole of my life.  

I am grateful to be the daughter of a mother who loved me deeply. My mother was raised without a mother from the age of four.  In all the years of my growing up as the oldest of five children, I very often felt alone. I attempted to do well in school, but always struggled, mom did not quite know how to support me. I really did not have role models for how to extend my educational goals or get through difficulties in school. l was a poor reader with dyslexic and ADHD tendencies. I struggled personally to feel supported and confidant about myself. There was little known about these learning disability issues when I was a child in elementary school. I was left alone as a young child, not understanding why I was often subjected to bulling by both students and teachers.  Therefore, I felt ashamed, painfully shy and inadequate. I would often give up on myself. I felt alone and helpless in knowing how to speak up for myself in these situations, which made my choices complicated. My role as the oldest of five children was not about developing myself, but about ensuring my sisters and brothers were safe, the house was organized and clean, and  that I was around when my dad called me for whatever reason. When I finally realized I did have a separate self from my family, I would be an adult with two young children and in a cross roads of determinations to seek a life for myself that was beyond the bounds of my family. I fully accept myself now. Life's lessons, my choices, my mistakes, the trials and suffering from them all have become my teachers. I take full responsibility! My parents and grandparents withstood the great depression, the dust bowl of the thirties, World War II and migration from hopelessness to strength and courage, with the passion to love deeply. Their strength to endure gave me the courage to, step by difficult step, find the path to my spiritual needs and my educational goals I would strive to sustain both as they are not separate in my eyes and continue to this day. I would become the first in the family to attend college and complete my Masters degree in Human Development. I would go on to teach child development at the community college and receive my state license as a mental health counselor. 

As young wives and mothers both of my grandmothers packed water when needed, milked cows, grew vegetables and flowers. Harvested corn, beets, tomatoes, potatoes, and more. They both rode horses, and not for pleasure. Raised chickens and children along side of each other. My father told me his mother carried baby chicks in her apron when working outside to protect them from harm. I remember Deedee mom telling me when she was in and out of sleep after coming home from nursing home after care to, "Remember to leave a pan by the faucet for the water to drip in for the chickens." I have since reflected on her words often and how frugal she had learned to be as a young woman growing up during the depression and living in the dust bowl era. My Grandmothers loved their babies with compassion and protection and demonstrated strength and courage in times of trial that reflected that love. Stories of these were told to me by my parents over the years. My Grandmother's carried courage in their hearts and modeled that path of courage for us through out their lives. Juanita's life taken from her family way too soon, free and wanting and somehow mysteriously haunting. Audrey's life was full and long. She was a loving care taker to so many throughout her lifetime.

The early loss of Juanita's life to an illness of hidden truths that stories and letters barely revealed, left my mother alone and unprotected at too early an age. She was the middle child with a brother about a year and a half older, Avery, and a brother about a year and a half younger, Bill.  From the family stories passed down and old letters that I've read, I believe my grandmother Juanita suffered from depression, which today in young mothers is diagnosed as postpartum depression or PPD. Certainly not a recognized medical diagnosis in 1933. Her passing was from an unfortunate miscarriage of her fourth child which took her life on June 23, 1933. There was some concern that arose from me in having read a few letters to my grandmother Juanita's husband, Sunny (Reinhart Edward) Kohls, from my grandmother Juanita's mother, Florence Gwinn Airington. In one letter Florence wrote, in July of 1933, how sorry she was that she could not come out from Hayward, California where she and the rest of the Airington's lived at the time to Fruita, Colorado where Sunny and Juanita had settled. In the letter my great grandmother wrote that she was sorry she hadn't written Juanita more often. She wrote that "it was the same old stuff going on for Juanita" and she knew that my grandfather Sunny and his family had been doing all they could for her. It was distressing for me when I first read this letter which was one of several others kept in a cigar box in a trunk that would come to my mother the year before she passed away. In that trunk with the letters would also be a purse that belonged to Juanita. In that purse was a undetermined medical prescription for Juanita that had not been filled, as best I could figure out. Juanita was one of eight children. There were several letters from other members of the Airington family urging Sunny to come to California after she passed away,  so Juanita's family could help him with the young children. This was something he could not manage. His parents, who were German immigrants,  lived in Fruita. This was their home and livelihood as farmers. There are stories from my mother about how Sunny's family helped with the children. At one point early in the first year of Juanita's passing my mother went to live with her aunt up the road from her father. However, it's never enough,being without her mother. As a farmer her father worked endlessly on the farm and left her tangled in un-named grief that she held tight in her heart all of her life.

I remember one of her visits to Anacortes, Washington where I was living and raising my daughters, mom and I were in a antique store in La Conner, WA called Nasty Jack's. Upstairs there was a rocking chair she recognized and when my mom saw it she said very distinctly, "Oh my gosh Connie this is the same rocking chair daddy sat in for so long, I thought he would never stop crying." That was an extraordinary statement, one of the first time's she had ever shared anything about that time in her life with me. It was a door into her childhood and an open window for questions that she might finally be able to answer for herself and for me. That was the year I had found Juanita's younger sister, Lucille, living in Seattle. During mom's visit I took her to visit Lucille. I slowly began to understand my mom and the reality that my grandfather had no idea how to take care of the three young children born close in age together, as he continued his work as a dairy farmer who also farmed eighty acres. The sadness remained buried in their grieving hearts all these years. This grief and pain settled deep in my mother's blood and bones from the moment of her mother's tragic death and would take her breath away. She suffered from asthma as a child and adult, and would pass away from emphysema, COPD and peripheral neuropathy.

My grandfather Sunny worked hard from sun up to sun down. He grieved the loss of his wife, Juanita. They were very much in love, as my mother tells the story. However, without any support with the heartache he and his children were experiencing, they were all left with the tragedy and grief to carry on the best they could as life pressed forward. Sunny would eventually marry his housekeeper, hired sometime in the first year of Juanita's death, a sad and distressful story of it's own that I choose not share here as I feel their relationship was one of a person manipulating a grieved father. A story so to be so disruptive to their lives that it is one of its own for future writing. There were many letters Sunny saved in the trunk that were written by the housekeeper to Sunny in which much was revealed to indicate these types of manipulative behaviors. Once my mother began to share her life with me over the next few years, its clear to me there was hidden and painful, deceitfulness behaviors occurring as my mother was growing up. The trunk that came to my mother in Washington via relatives from Colorado, sat in my mother's bedroom bedroom where she grew up throughout her childhood. Mom told me she remembered it was in her bedroom closet as a child. The trunk returned back to her by very sweet relatives the year before my mom passed away. There were many family photos along with all of the the many letters my grandfather saved over the years. The funeral notebook for Juanita as well as a lock of my grandmother's hair.Over the next several weeks and months as I visited mom we would go through the trunk together. I would turn on my iphone and record our sessions together as we went through the trunk and she gently told to me about her life. We did not get to the some of the letters together and I don't know if she ever read them or not. However, after mom passed it took years before I could go through the trunk that was handed down to me.The trunk that was carried from Colorado to my mother by her great grand nieces in May of 2014, the year before mom passed away at the age of 86. I was 67 years old. 

One year after after moving to Anacortes mom gave me a gift. The year they retired to Anacortes was 1997. She had been holding on to it for many years After attending her father's funeral in Colorado in June of 1985, my mother brought a few things home in an old suitcase that belonged to her father. She had been saving those beloved treasures all that time. The gift to me was an unfinished quilt top made by her mother, Juanita. Mom was so tender with it when she handed it to me. In that moment there seemed a life passage taking place for both of us. I finished that quilt and gave it to my mom for her 70th birthday. I wonder to myself now if that beautiful hand made quilt top didn't come from that old trunk. As the first granddaughter, that trunk and the photos and letters of condolences was left to me after mom passed in 2015. It wasn't until 2023 that I finally reread and labeled all of the letters and sorted out her precious things.  After heart felt turmoil, I needed to empty the trunk completely. It was time. That same year our 20 year grandson had come to visit from Toronto for Christmas. He was doing genealogy research and wanted to explore the items in the trunk. He traveled home with many photos that he would later scan and document into our family tree on Ancestry.com. Later that year I  organized the remaining photos and letters and have them well kept in a small storage container. In the summer of 2024 the trunk went to the second hand store, now a treasure for someone else.

Before all that however, my mother and I went through all that was in that trunk. We did not read the letters in the cigar box together, she may have when I was not with her. I dont know. Each time I visited her to go through the trunk I would record my mother telling me stories. Each photo becoming another page in her history for me as we went through them. I noticed the beautiful stories and the sorrows in her heart that she carried for so long lifted some of her pain and created a space for joy during those days. We are grateful to our Colorado relatives for honoring my mother with their visit and gift of returning the family trunk that year. I knew then how she learned to deeply love herself and her five children and her life. She did not allow the pain to confuse or manipulate her love. Nor did she allow the love between her parents that she felt and remembered to vanish from her heart.

My courageous mother was too young to be a breathless and motherless child. My Grandmother was too young to die. I know this because I feel it and I carry it in my heart. There were gaps in our relationship of course. How could there not be. As the oldest of five children, I sometimes was left to wander, growing up with that vulnerability and yearning for the answers that hid in a void. My mother did not know how to willingly share her pain and yet and still, she did in her actions that I came to understand. There were gaps and quietness which I witnessed in her not being able to show up for me at a school play or music concert or a gathering outside our family. In time as we worked together going through the contents in the trunk, which took a few months because too much was too much at one time, her heart softened to be able to share what she had long been holding in. She told me stories that were told to her about her mother, my grandmother. The fastest rider, the best at catching fish. How the children ran barefoot and free and played joyfully and without fear. “Little urchins we were called by some of the farming neighbors”, my mother said.

Healing stories. For truth does not abandon the hearts that fly free.

I'm the first daughter still standing now and I carry these stories and deep healing in my heart. I share them willingly.

Conversations held as miracles.

I carry the wisdom of the now untangled grief and weave it with the heart of my mother and grandmother with love, with the deep love, that was gifted to me from their lives and their courageous stories and experiences. Healing that did not come without the tangled, strangling grief of a breathless child left wandering, vulnerable, and motherless, holding on the love in her heart and courageously offering that love to me and each one of her beloved children.

I know this now. Because I am the first daughter still standing and I am my mother's witness. Mom passed on December 25, 2015. Hospice helped us care for her in their home. We were all with her, she was never alone, she is loved deeply!

The story of my father's mother, Audrey Mae Stanton Bonner, is one of courage, endurance, and strength. She first came to visit us when I was just learning to talk. My father wanted me to understand that his mother was coming to visit. I did not call my father daddy or Dada, I called him Deedee. He told me Deedee's mom was coming to visit. Thereafter, she was always Deedee mom to me, and throughout her life to the rest of her grandchildren and family. Deedee mom was at our home for every birth. She cared for my mother and the new baby, she cooked and cleaned while mom rested from childbirth and nurtured us all. There are five children in our family. Deedee mom was there when my dad and I brought my baby brother and mom home from the hospital, their fifth and very unexpected child. I was fourteen at the time, I became her helper. There was much for me to do. Several months later when it was time for Deedee mom to leave, I stayed the helper of caring for my baby brother. I wheeled him in his stroller as I sold Girl Scout cookies all around the neighborhood. He was the center of attention at sleepovers and birthday parties.

Deedee mom was left to care for herself and her two sisters when she was about 12 years old. Her mother had passed away from an illness that I don't remember ever talking to her about. There are no stories that I can remember of her mother's illness. Never the less, Deedee mom became quite self reliant at a very early age. My father tells me that when he was a boy he drove cattle with his father on a cattle ranch that they worked on. My grandmother was the cook for the ranch hands, dad said. He has stories that he has written about and so I wont try to go between the lines here. My dad's family stories, which have been written and told by him have been recorded and preserved. They are wonderful in their own right. They are on our website, with his own link, Bob Bonner's Stories.

What I will write about is what I learned from Deedee mom. I spent a great deal of time with her. I stayed with her many weekends. By the time I was ten years old I knew how to make dresses and worked with her on hand made quilt projects. Every one of her grandchildren was given a handmade quilt at some point in their childhood. Her quilts were a part of us. When I was a young girl Deedee mom was a caretaker for a priest in a Catholic Church in Santa Clara, California. I would help her in her work. We would shop together. She taught me how to set the table for serving the priest breakfast and dinner, where to place the silver, the crystal glasses, the bell next to his chair that he would ring if he needed something. I learned how to cook in a style of presentation for the table. Beautiful side dishes with various colors and displays, just like in the cooking magazines. I learned how to buy a pork roast and how to make jello salad in just the right mold and with just the right fruit. In the evening she would sew on her machine and I would watch her, sometimes helping. One weekend she decided I needed a new pair of pajamas. I stood by her sewing machine and watched her sew me a pair of blue flowered, flannel pajamas that I wore to bed that night.

In the Spring of 1976 she had been suffering from breast cancer and was just home from being in an after care nursing center. My father asked me if I would spend time with her. My children were 1 1/2 and 3 1/2 years old. We stayed with her for about a month. She was mostly bed ridden, but slowly found energy. We would sit together and go through her photo albums. She would share her stories and treasures. We would cook together. One day she got up from bed, knowing I would be leaving soon, and made me a beautiful pink flowered, long flannel nightgown. I was going back to Washington where I lived and she wanted me to be warm. I had made pajamas and robes for my children from what she taught me, so they did not have a need at the time. Those precious days were the last that I would be with my Deedee mom.

Endearing to me was her commitment to every year making each grandchild a special birthday cake. For every birthday she somehow managed to show up to make a cake, and always from scratch, even the frosting. She had a very special musical birthday cake plate that played happy birthday. I learned to make the best apple dumplings and carrot cake and yes, the best german chocolate cake ever from her. I flew to her funeral in California the Fall of 1976 with my little daughters, just a few months after we had spent that precious month together, to join my family and the hundreds that attended her funeral at the Methodist church in Santa Clara where she was a member. Deedee mom is buried at the Mission Cemetery in Santa Clara. Her son Leroy Bonner, was laid to rest next to her after his passing in 1996.

I am the first daughter still standing. I am a mother. I am a Grandmother.

I am deeply loved. And I love deeply.

I am sometimes breathless with pain. I have healing stories of my own to share. I speak of them willingly, but not always. I learned this from all the beautiful women in my family who carried courage in their hearts. Released. Freed from wandering, knowing my heart and my path.

My daughters will not be breathless. Too often. My mother is no longer breathless. She Flies Free.

My daughters are deeply loved. I know this, because I see it, I feel it in their children, my six grandchildren. My grandchildren are deeply loved. They deeply love. I know this because I witness their love. I am their Grandmother. I am still standing.

My Grandmothers rode horses.

They carried courage in their hearts and passed it on to me. Courage to deeply love, held firmly like the strength of a horse that holds all the wisdom the ancestors carry. Passing it down through their hearts, with the power and strength of a horse, yet gentle as the soft downy feathers of a baby chick, like the smooth leather of a saddle bag.

I know this. I am Grandmother still standing. I hold the wisdom oh my ancestors in each breath I take.

I’ve learned how to breathe. They have gifted me the understanding, the wisdom of their trials, pain, and suffering and courage. The power in my Grandmothers, in my mother, is the the power of their endless courage to love deeply. I know this.

I am First Daughter, Still Standing.

Title photo, First Daughter Still Standing, is of me and taken by Chuck Britt, on December 24, 2024. We were offering a Christmas wreath for my parents at Grandview Cemetery, Anacortes where they are buried together.

Below photo is of me and my mother and one of my favorites! Taken by Chuck Britt when we visited Mt Constitution on Orcas Island in the early 2000's, dad was with us as well. 

Photo of my mother about 1974. Orosi, California. She was on the horse they bought and where my parents purchased five acres of orange groves. Some years after I left home. They lived a very happy life there until moving to Folsom, CA. where they bought a mom and pop store and gas station. In 1997 they retired and moved to Anacortes. More on that when I write my dad's story.

 Photo of my grandfather, Sunny Kohls, and his team of work horses. Fruita, Colorado. Early 1930's.