Bonita Malone Hellyer - My Great Grandmother

February 20, 2025

Bonita Hellyer was my great grandmother. She was born in 1911 and I was lucky enough to get to know her into my twenties – her early hundreds. She was tough, smart, and made the best cinnamon rolls I’ve ever had in my life. She had her coffee everyday, took her nap, and when she felt she was too old to drive (I think she was in her eighties), she stopped driving. When I was little, she had the most beautiful garden I’ve ever seen in her backyard. It was something out of a fairytale – irises in brilliant hues of lavender, and blue, sunflowers taller than the back fence, and more flowers than I could name then. When I walked through this garden, carefully keeping to the walkways, I felt like Alice when she met the flowers in Wonderland while she was tiny. Great Grammie showed me a teeny robin’s egg that she kept after the robin had hatched, as if she knew I’d understand how special that was.

When I was older, she adopted – somewhat unintentionally, a cat. She lived with her son, who restored some of the most amazing classic cars I’ve ever had the privilege of being around and sitting in. He was working in the garage on one of his cars when a cat wandered in. He shouted, “Hey-you!” at the stray, and the cat was thusly named. Hey-you became part of their household, as if he had always been intended to be there.

She was always encouraging of my writing – sometimes I’d be exhausted of people at family gatherings, so I’d find a quiet corner somewhere and write in my spiral notebook, disappearing into whatever story came to my mind.

I was really lucky to know her for as long as I did. And I have been lucky enough to have been given her journals. I know she wasn’t perfect, and that I no doubt have a rose-colored idea of her, but I also know that her stories are important parts of history and need to be transcribed.

I’ve also decided to transcribe them for another reason – I was informed recently that other members of the family would like to read them. I am the self-appointed archivist of their family, so I will absolutely not be loaning the original works out. I will, however, post them. I hope I’m doing the right thing to honor her, and her memory as best I can. She was an amazing person and meant a lot to me growing up. Even now, I can still smell her distinct scent, a combination of the soap she used and the dryer sheets she used for her clothes. I know, not terribly descript, but it was ust her.

One last thing – she had a little sign over her seventies olive colored oven that said, “Only wusses cook on low.” It always made me laugh, and sometimes I still think about it when I too cook on high.

For anyone who reads this, family, friend, or curious observer, I ask only this: through whatever we find in these journals remember that my Great Grammie loved her family. She was our matriarch who seemed to always know what to do, and when she tired of the discussion, she’d turn off her hearing aids. She was amazing with plants, taught her son how to hunt when her husband wouldn’t do it, and even shot a rattlesnake threatening her children when they were young. She’d been without running water at different points in her life, was a teacher for a long time, and she saw each of her family members for who they were, saw the good and bad, and loved them for the good that was there.

I hope to do her proud with this work.