I learned to sew on my maternal grandmother’s sewing machine. It is a Singer powered by a lever that you move with your knee. I later inherited the machine from my mother. I first learned to sew in junior high school and made my own clothes for years when girls wore dresses to school. Later, in my twenties, I learned how to quilt using sewing scraps and pieces of old clothing. I still piece quilts together.  I’m telling you this because I’d like to tell you my grandmother’s story. Never having known her, I have to use small scraps of information that I have heard over the years to piece together her story.

In our family a grandmother is called Nonna. My Nonna’s name was Annetta Biglione (Bill-ē-ṓ-nay). She was born in 1900 in the small town of Sampeyre (Sam-paý-ray) in the Italian Alps.  When she was one-year old, she and her mother came on a ship to the United States to join her father who had immigrated to the US the year before. They settled in the foothills of Mt. Rainier in Washington. I don’t know much about her childhood but two more girls were born into her family.  My mother said that Annetta, as the oldest child in the family, worked very hard for her mother.

When she was fifteen my grandmother learned she was pregnant and married my grandfather who was twelve years her senior. Her first daughter, my aunt Norma, was born in 1916. Two years later Elsie was born.  Elsie died seven months later during the 1918 flu epidemic. In 1923, my mother, Eleanor was born.

My grandfather worked as a coal miner, a laborer, and a road builder.  My grandmother worked seasonally in a canning factory. She clerked at a corner grocery store in their neighborhood, and also sewed at home for a clothing company using the machine I still have. A cousin who knew her said she was very kind and would help anyone who was ill or in need.

In 1934, when my aunt was 18 and my mother was 11, my Nonna became pregnant again.  Abortions were illegal at that time but she, a 34-year-old married woman with two daughters, made the decision to get an abortion.  She died after the procedure and her death certificate says that she died from “septicemia following after an abortion.”

When I think of my Nonna, I think of my 12-year-old granddaughter whose middle name is Annetta. It’s hard to imagine what her life would be like without her mother. I can’t imagine what my mother went through when she was eleven. Later in her life, my mother told us she was determined to live until her youngest child was at least eighteen.  My brother, the youngest, was 64-years-old when she died.

Annetta’s abortion took place during the height of the Great Depression when so many people’s lives were difficult. I can’t cut through the veil of ninety years and tell you the details of my grandmother’s life, what her marriage was like, or why she decided to get an abortion. I trust that her decision was made believing that it was best choice for her family. Both my mother and my aunt were kind, generous, gracious, and very intelligent human beings. I believe that they became these incredible women because of their mother. I wish that I could have known her.