How Gramma Built a Woodland Retreat from a Firecracker Shack
Grit, Grace, and DNA, Part 4
The year: 1965—
The place: Potomac Valley, Western Montana
Subject: Effie Agnes Marie Desonia Merwin Morris (1913-1994)
Gramma. Where do I start?
Gramma was the anchor in my otherwise wobbly life …
… the woman who raised my abandoned brother and me and made stability look like something you could build with gumption, chicken and dumplings, and the right tool for the job.
All nine of her grandchildren, near and far, worshiped her. Maybe it was just me, but I doubt it. I cherished her, had a healthy fear of her, and – during my arrogant young-adult years – took her for granted.
I have a thousand stories about her, but this is one of the best: How Gramma built a woodland retreat from a discarded firecracker shack.
It took massive imagination, a great deal of muscle from the menfolk, and three exuberant grandkids — Ken, our cousin Sam, and me— chopping kindling, sloshing buckets of water, and cheering the whole enterprise along.
We eventually dubbed this claptrap encampment “Camp Gramma.”
Let me tell you we right now that we squatted there, as in, illegally assembled a ramshackle semi-circle of structures around a fire pit that was five feet from a creek, on land we absolutely did not own.
In today’s terms, it was a zoning nightmare.
It all started with a plywood firecracker shack—a hand-me-down half-building with wide-open windows stretching the length of its better half. The roof slanted downward from the front at a steep pitch.
Kids once lined up at those shacks to order fireworks — Black Cats, Cherry Bombs, Magic Snakes, sparklers by the armload.
If you had real money, you bought Roman Candles and Jumbo Assortment Packs that could light up a neighborhood.
By the time Gramma found it, the shack held nothing but the ghosts of black powder and indifference. Destination: the dump.
Until Gramma saw it.
Gramma looked that shack up and down—and where everyone else saw a smelly pile of scrap, she saw possibility.
To her, nothing was ever used up. It was just waiting for its next life.
In that shack, Gramma saw structure and foundation, solidity, roots, jolly times, and a place in which to pour the full weight of her passion, grit, and imagination.
From there, Camp grew like a stubborn weed.
We doubled the shack into a real cabin — potbelly stove, two beds, a long kitchen counter, and a picture window aimed straight at the creek.
Two campers on saw horses flanked it like loyal bodyguards. We built a woodpile the size of a semi-truck and cooked outdoors on an antique cast-iron stove.
We couldn’t get enough of that place.
We spent every possible day and night there—fishing, hiking, reading, roasting marshmallows, baking bread, harvesting potatoes from the rich black soil.
Summer swirled around us in pine scent, warm dry air, mosquito bites, and the ever-present perfume of wood smoke and fresh-cut plywood.
Those days settled into our bones.
Camp wasn’t just a place we visited. It was training for life.
Camp helped shape me, weaving itself into the person I became—and the person who remained when everything else fell away.
Decades later, after Gramma first conjured Camp from castoffs and leftovers, I found myself looked into a mirror that reflected nothing back to me—just a hollow scaffolding of bones.
Freshly divorced, I was rebuilding my life from scratch with nothing to anchor me except a dog named Pippin, a 1999 Saab convertible named Maurice, and a thin thread of hope that happiness might still be possible.
But I had a place to start.
I began stitching my life back together, always returning in my mind to Camp — and to the woman who built it from nothing.
If you take anything from this story, let it be this:
You are more than you know.
You come from people who built something out of nothing—who looked at scraps and saw possibility.
Their imagination didn’t end with them.
It lives quietly inside you, waiting for the moment when all that you counted on dissolves, and you must begin again.
And when that moment comes, you may discover – as I did – that you already know how to start.
You begin with whatever you have left.
And you build.
# # #
This is Part 4 of a new seven-part series, Grit, Grace, and DNA—an excavation of legacy: The brilliance, the burden, and the quiet ways we learn to live butter side up.
The saga continues next week with Part 5, “I Inherited Strength: How Dad Smoked His Last Cigarette While Driving to the Emergency Room.”
Read Part 1, “I Inherited Courage: How Lon and Cecilia Threw Themselves from a Moving Train” here.
Read Part 2, “I Inherited Gumption: How Pearly Jack Merwin Walked North into Canada and Disappeared” here.
Read Part 3, “I Inherited Tenacity: How Aunt Toots Fended Off the Oil Men” here.
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Kyla Merwin 