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Martha McGill McCullough Horne: Wellesley, Sanibel, & Santa Fe, 1905-1997
Martha McGill McCullough Horne: Wellesley, Sanibel, & Santa Fe, 1905-1997
My maternal grandmother lived to be 92, and always signed her letters (including her e-mail) "Grama TC" for "Traveling Companion." Family photos show Martha in her roadster at Mount Holyoke, where she majored in math in the Roaring Twenties; on a camel at the Pyramids; in a Hawaiian lei on a black sand beach; posed in front of Mount Fuji; at the wheel of a Maine windjammer; collecting petrified wood in Arizona or shells on Sanibel Island; and silhouetted against a robins-egg Caribbean sea. My favorite memory of her is in the Paris nightclub with the Japanese computer engineers from Yugoslavia, but that's another story.
I got my Guild 12-string guitar for a song--this song. Composed for Martha's eightieth birthday, it was sung at her memorial service, by her request.
You were always a traveling woman
A spirit creative and free
You were born with a love of the wide open world
That you traveled your travels to see.
You were raised in the New England country
Rode horses in 1919
Then you went off to college to study mathematics
In summers served Cape Cod ice cream.
Then you journeyed to earn independence
Keeping books at Cornell had its charm
Single woman at thirty, you were married in June
Raised your kids on a New Hampshire farm.
And you raised them a traveling woman
A spirit creative and free
You raised them with love of the wide open world
That you traveled your travels to see.
At fifty-five, you were a Grama
At sixty you went round the world
Riding camels in Egypt and junks in Hong Kong
Twice the tales of those travels unfurled.
Then you passed on your gifts to another
Taught a child how to travel alone
Roamed the beach hunting wentletraps
Learning the birds
Making your love of nature my own.
For you were my traveling woman
A spirit creative and free
I was born with your love of the wide open world
That you traveled your travels to see.
From the bridge and the brook and the Big Rock
And the trees that you taught me to climb
I have journeyed through Europe, Alaska, West Indies
Growing stronger and braver each time.
And sometimes you are my companion
And sometimes I travel alone
But I'll always remember the lifetime we've shared
As I roam through this world on my own.
For now I am a traveling woman
The latest in a lineage of three
You gave me my love of the wide open world
Now you travel my travels with me.
Yes, you gave me your love and your wide open world
Now you'll travel forever in me.
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