The America my parents built

By Vanesa Brashier
Publisher of Bluebonnet News

This weekend the United States of America will celebrate its 250th birthday.

There will be fireworks lighting up the night sky, flags waving from front porches and small-town parades winding through streets lined with families. There will also be debate. Some will spend the occasion reflecting on our nation’s shortcomings. Others will focus on its triumphs.

When I think about America, however, I don’t begin with politics or history books. I begin with my family.

Both of my parents were born in the years surrounding the end of World War II. They grew up in rural Texas under circumstances that many young people today would find difficult to imagine. Yet if you asked either one of them about those years, you wouldn’t hear bitterness. You’d hear gratitude.

My mother, Dorothy Brashier, was the daughter of a sharecropper.

My grandfather, Lester Jones, built the house where my mother spent much of her childhood. Money was scarce, so the family moved in before it was finished. For one winter, there were no windows. Tarps covered the openings while they saved enough money to buy glass.

My mother remembers waking up on freezing mornings and seeing icicles hanging inside the house. Not outside. Inside.

Her bedroom was scarcely larger than what many people today would call a walk-in closet. There wasn’t a closet full of clothes because there wasn’t money for that many clothes. My grandmother, Stella McCreight Jones, made many of my mother’s dresses from cotton feed sacks. Back then, livestock feed and seed often came in colorful cloth bags, and resourceful women washed them, cut them apart and stitched them into dresses, quilts, shirts and aprons.

You made do with what you had.

Stella wasn’t just a homemaker. She was a partner in every sense of the word. She worked alongside my grandfather on the farm, planted gardens, tended animals, canned vegetables and fruits, cooked meals, watched children and hung laundry on a clothesline beneath the Texas sun. Every jar she sealed during the summer meant food on the table months later. Every dress she made meant one less expense the family had to bear.

Despite having so little, my mother never remembers being hungry.

Both of my grandparents believed that if you worked the land, the land would provide. Gardens filled with vegetables, livestock in the pasture and a pantry lined with jars of home-canned food meant the family always had something to eat.

My late father Riley Marshall Brashier’s story began just as humbly.

As a toddler, my dad’s first home was built from flattened oil cans with a dirt floor beneath his feet. There was a single hanging light illuminating the room. In the heat of the day, you had to be outside because it was too hot indoors. Later on, they moved into a small two-bedroom home on Sue Street in Liberty that my grandfather built. It wasn’t much to look at, but it was home.

My grandfather, Owen Riley Brashier, helped build ships during World War II. Like thousands of Americans, he worked around asbestos before anyone understood the danger. Years later, he developed asbestosis, a disease that slowly stole his breath and made the final years of his life incredibly difficult.

His sacrifice wasn’t made on a battlefield, but it was a sacrifice nonetheless.

Beside him was my grandmother, Ollie Henry Brashier.

Like Stella, work was simply part of who she was. She worked for LaFour Minimax in Liberty while helping raise her family. She believed in earning your way, doing your part and never being afraid of hard work.

Those values found their way into my father’s life early.

At just 12 years old, my dad would leave school, run home, then run several blocks to LaFour Minimax in Liberty, where he first bagged groceries before eventually learning the butcher’s trade. Those long afternoons didn’t seem unusual to him. They were simply part of growing up.

Looking back, it’s remarkable. Today, many would see those childhoods and only notice the hardships.

My parents saw something different. They saw parents who never quit. They saw families who worked together. They saw hope and opportunity.

One of my favorite memories growing up wasn’t a vacation or an expensive gift. It was watching our family gather to shuck corn, shell peas and prepare vegetables for canning. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins—everyone had a place around the table. Conversations lasted for hours while hands never stopped moving. When the work was done, the food was divided so every household had something to put away for later.

Looking back, I realize those gatherings weren’t just about preserving food. They were preserving family. No one asked whether helping benefited them personally. Helping was simply what families did.

That lesson may be one of the greatest gifts my grandparents ever passed down. Another came in the form of land.

Though Lester and Stella Jones had humble beginnings, they somehow managed to provide each of their children with something that represented hope for the future. My parents, and my uncle and aunt, Alton and Elaine Jones, each received a half-acre homesite where they could build their first homes.

Think about that for a moment. People who once spent a winter without windows found a way to give each of their children a place to begin. They weren’t leaving behind wealth. They were leaving behind opportunity.

What began with my maternal grandparents’ homesite in Moss Hill has grown into roughly 50 acres where about 28 members of our family now live among seven homes. That number will continue to grow as more houses are built and new generations put down roots.

Some people dream of moving away. Our family has always dreamed of staying close.

We don’t gather to shell peas anymore. Most of us buy our vegetables at the grocery store these days. But the spirit behind those gatherings lives on.

We celebrate birthdays and holidays together. We gather for Sunday lunches.

We’ve even started what we call “Sunday Funday” once each month. Lunch is intentionally simple—sandwiches or whatever is easy—because the meal isn’t the point.

The point is family. We play board games. Sometimes we just sit around, talk and hold babies. Sometimes we simply sit together on Mom’s back porch and talk while the grandchildren run from house to house, or gather at the makeshift basketball goal in her front yard.

In a world that often seems determined to pull families apart, we’re trying to preserve something my grandparents understood instinctively: families don’t stay close by accident. They stay close because someone makes it a priority.

As America approaches its 250th birthday, I know our country has never been perfect. No honest reading of history would suggest otherwise, but I also know this.

I know a sharecropper built a house with his own hands, even if the windows had to wait until another season. I know a grandmother turned feed sacks into dresses and gardens into pantries.

I know a shipyard worker helped build the vessels that defended freedom, even though that work eventually cost him his health. I know another grandmother worked outside the home while raising a family and teaching her children that honest work is never beneath anyone.

I know a 12-year-old boy ran from school to a grocery store every afternoon because responsibility mattered.

And I know two parents who never measured success by what they lacked. They measured it by what they were able to provide for their children.

My grandparents left their children half-acre homesites. My parents offered each of their three daughters an acre of land or cash equivalence.

My husband and I are giving each of our three daughters two acres of land — a place where they and their children after them — will always know they belong.

That’s what the American Dream has meant to my family. Not that life would be easy. Not that success would be guaranteed.

But that one generation could work hard enough, sacrifice enough and love deeply enough to leave the next standing on a little higher ground.

When the fireworks light the sky this weekend, I’ll certainly celebrate our nation’s birthday.

But I’ll also be celebrating my grandparents Lester and Stella Jones, and Owen and Ollie Brashier, and my parents, Marshall and Dorothy Brashier.

They never built monuments. They built homes. They built a future. They built families filled with love.

In many ways, they built the America I know, and I believe it’s still worth celebrating.