Everyday Obituaries: Nanna (Fay) Harms

 

 

 

 

We celebrated Nanna’s (my mother Fay’s) life, at her funeral service at St Mark’s Lutheran Church in Mt Barker on Monday, November 18.

Harmses tend to be lachrymose – easily moved to tears. Actually, we are lachrymose. Probably because we know the Valley of Tears, and we know the joy to be found in the Valley of Tears.

I have three brothers: Peter, David and Michael. None of us was going to be able to read Nanna’s eulogy.

And so the responsibility fell to three grandchildren: David and Irene’s daughter Bethany Harms, her brother Samuel Harms, and Peter and Fiona’s daughter Laura. The world is in good hands.

The eulogy (which was an ever-so-slightly shortened version of the words below) was followed by a montage of photos, set to one of Nanna’s favourite pieces of music, which she played, and her family members continue to play, on the piano and the organ: ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’.

 

Bethany Harms:

 

Nanna.

To help us imagine our dear Nanna as a young girl, Uncle John wrote a few words to build a picture.

Fay Dorothy Harms was born on January 2, 1940, just four months after the declaration of World War II. She was the fourth of six children of Jim Logan and Anne Weier.

Nanna is probably playing Scrabble in Heaven with her sister June, and brothers Cecil and Peter right now. Her younger sisters, Lynette and Pam are watching this funeral service from their homes in Queensland.

Nanna’s mother was one of fifteen Weier children and her uncles and aunts became names the Harms family heard and, later, characters they met, and still remember. They kept the stats up for the Lutheran Church.

Faith and family were the two cornerstones of Nanna’s life. The Logans were members at Ropely, where Nanna was baptized. She never missed church, or Sunday School, where the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and The Apostle’s Creed were part of her. She learnt the lean and precise explanations of these elements of the Christian faith penned by Martin Luther in his Small Catechism, which had remained unchanged since the sixteenth century.

Nanna’s family were small crop farmers at Tent Hill on the edge of the ranges south-west of Gatton in Queensland’s Lockyer Valley. They grew potatoes, pumpkins, onions, beans, watermelons, rockmelons and whatever would adorn the dinner plates of those meat-and-three-veg days of the 1940s and 50s. They all pitched in and Nanna learnt how to work hard, and efficiently, a skill she carried with her throughout her life.

The farmhouse was a timber, high-set Queenslander, with a double staircase, verandas around a couple of sides and a rose garden out the front. The back garden spread down the slope towards Tent Hill Creek which, in those days, almost always flowed. Each day, they walked across a fallen log, that Grandpa Logan had carved flat for them, and walked the mile to Tent Hill State School. Sometimes they required the assistance of their workhorse Bonnie.

After Scholarship, Nanna was a boarder at Concordia College in Toowoomba, just as her brothers and sisters were. She was a terrific student, which her Junior report shows. She played the piano and sang. She was a talented athlete and sportswoman, quick across the ground and, given she was barely thirty when her boys were at their naughtiest, could run them down even when carrying a wooden spoon.

As was often the case for young women in those days, Nanna left school to work – in the National Bank at Gatton. She learnt shorthand and typing and the other skills of the time and the work girls soon became her friends.

Her social life revolved around the church, and the extended church, and this brought her into the legendary Queensland Luther League, a community of Lutheran singles that went on camps and retreats to places like Luther Heights at Coolum where, among other things, they played rounders, performed concerts with skits, and did synchronized dancing, a sort of 1950s Lutheran ‘Nutbush’.

In the photos of those days, Nanna has a happy face, cheery eyes, and the warmest smile. While secretary of Luther League, Nanna worked closely with the president, Elmore Harms, who was the pastor at Chinchilla on the Darling Downs. They fell in love and were married in Toowoomba in May, 1961.

Uncle John says that being married to Poppa would have been a shock to the system.

By December 1964, they had three boys – John, Peter and my Dad, David. At just 24, Nanna had her hands full. By then they were living in the Wangaratta parish in north-east Victoria.

Uncle Mick came along later in 1972.

 

Laura Harms:

As a young mother, Nanna always trusted that the good Lord would look after her and her family. Reflecting in her later years, she always said she had no idea what she was doing. But that was just Nanna. Of all things, she was loving.

In Wangaratta, she started the first of her gardens. However, just as it was taking shape, Poppa accepted the call to Shepparton, a provincial city about an hour in the Morris 1100 (Floats on Fluid) down the road where, in a newly built manse, they had to create a new garden.

Being the wife of the pastor was a full-time role – throughout her life. She had the strongest sense of calling and of duty.

She was also part of the community. During five years in Shepparton, she was active at Gowrie Street Primary School and in the Red Devils Little Athletics Club.

Dad accepted the call to Oakey on the Darling Downs, and the family moved Up North a month before Uncle Mick was born. She was back in Queensland with her extended family, giving the Harms family time to get to know the dramatis personae of Logan characters.

As the Oakey Harmses were going through the busy years of high school, Nanna made it all happen. This affirmed her faith in miracles.

She was in a household of sports-mad boys – five of them.

She liked sport – enough.

On summer Saturdays, the boys played club cricket for Wests, at three different grounds in Toowoomba. Nanna would drop each off and then head off to Jack the Slasher or New World to do the shopping. After that, each thought, she must have been watching another brother’s match. Recently she let it slip that she’d sometimes duck into the Toowoomba Library just to have a little break. In a hectic week, very few minutes were her own.

Nanna was very talented. She could really write; uncomplicated, newsy letters, conversational, written with warmth and a hint of cheeky humour. To her, they were just letters. She loved music and was often the organist for Sunday service, shoes off, pedaling and belting out ‘For all the Saints’ or ‘Now thank we all our God.’

The breadth of her skill was illustrated during Vacation Bible School each January – which everyone loved. She was the director (probably best for everyone), the timetabler, the manager, the motivator, the leader, a teacher (an absolute natural), the providore, the everything. She always had the best support. Those weeks are fondly remembered.

The boys went off to uni.

During this time Nanna and Poppa and Uncle Mick moved to Eudunda in South Australia where Uncle Mick finished high school. At the manse, despite the frigid winters, and the fierce summers, she and Poppa set out to build another garden – the first of their two magnificent gardens. Their nineteenth century stone home became a retreat from the demands of The World.

She loved having her boys at home and they loved being there as she waited patiently for these slow-maturing Harms men to get their acts together.

Her love and loyalty were revealed in her unfailing support for Poppa through his ministry and his life and, by 1996, they were ready to ease into retirement. They established their little house in Mt Barker in the Adelaide Hills and remained active in the Church, here at St Mark’s, thee congregation that was to become so central to their lives. They felt very welcome and, over the years, built deep and enduring friendships. You were all so dear to Nanna.

Initially, Hughes Street had little on it. Over the years, they turned it into Eden.

Nanna became a world leader on compost.

No architect could have designed the flow that was the house out into the garden and the garden into the house. The garden, with its Santa Anna lawn, was full of God’s bountiful gifts: fruit trees – an early peach, a Christmas peach, a January peach, a nectarine, a lemon, a lemonade, apricots, a plum and apples – recalcitrant raspberry bushes, and a prolific vege garden. Colourful flowers: lilies, irises, daffs, dahlias and the choir of other bulbs, gladdies, humble nasturtiums, pansies and petunias, borders of thriving alyssum, lobelia, so many grown for floral arrangements in St Mark’s, or for their own kitchen. Roses, every variety known by name, like children.

Nanna welcomed all of God’s creatures – although she wasn’t big on aphids and she had to work hard to find the Divine in snails. She preferred un-greedy parrots. She loved the pardalotes that made Hughes Street their haven and she always had bushes which were home to the chrysalises which turned into butterflies.

If Eudunda was a retreat, Mt Barker was a sanctuary, and everyone loved to visit, from wherever they were: Brisbane, Melbourne, Hamilton or, just at the bottom of the freeway, the Kensington Road Harmses.

The garden flourished. The family grew.

 

Samuel:

Having spent years waiting for her boys to settle, Nanna found blessed relief in her daughters-in-law. Firstly, my mother Irene, then Janelle, then Fiona, and finally Susan.

Nanna loved them all and, just as she was surprised her sons actually got jobs (except for Uncle John), she was shocked that such wonderful women would fall in love with her boys. For her, it affirmed the power of prayer.

As we grandkids came along, eleven of us, Nanna became Nanna and, after Poppa died in 2010, she became Nanna even more.

Despite her sadness, she blossomed and blossomed and blossomed.

We loved going to Mt Barker. We loved being with her. She was in her element, she was home.

She loved games. The Scrabble board came out every visit, and she played a lot on the internet, choosing her opponents judiciously: tough enough to make for a challenging contest, but not too tough to affect her Career Scrabble Stats. She loved playing cards with us – we had so many noisy games of Up and Down the River, which she called Narky.

Nanna loved coming to our homes, arriving with a car laden with goodies: along with a book of devotions, she’d bring fruit, lemons, beans, maybe some spuds, home-dried apricots (“I like them a bit chewy”), a banana cake, a date loaf, a box of artistically iced honey biscuits, a bottle of chocolate-coated almonds (“Don’t worry, I got them on special”), a four-pack of Bundaberg ginger beer, a mettwurst, a ball of crocheted plant ties, two hanging baskets of geraniums to exchange (“They’re looking a bit tired”), numerous seedlings, some garment that had been left at Hughes Street for her to mend, and an envelope with $20 for the grandkid who’d won the month’s prize in the official Nanna and Poppa Footy Tipping Competition. All crammed into the little Mazda.

She’d always bring her own spade (ancient and sharp), her magic secateurs and gardening knife, her gloves and her hat. She’d have a cuppa and then she’d be out in the garden. Nanna would do twice as much in six hours as we dilly-dalliers could do in six months. She was transformative. As Uncle Mick always says, “She did everything so well.”

Her beautiful garden was open to the community. No fence. Garage door open. Side gate open.

The seasons had their own rhythm and people walked by and stopped for a look and a chat, and to buy some jam or some roses (Nanna assisted many courtships), or a bunch of chrysanthemums for Mother’s Day. She could have charged five times the price. She kept a bit of cash for the grandkids, and for Dynamic Lifter or gypsum, maybe even Rose Food, but most went towards a Lutheran church project.

All done in Love. She was so kind.

Not only did she sustain those around her, she nourished them, physically and spiritually. More than she ever realized – the ultimate measure of humble service.

That was Nanna. The Love of Christ had been revealed to her in her earliest days and she had no cause to replace the words which satisfied her understanding of this deep sense of being.

She sang to us grandchildren, “Jesus loves me, this I know.” She lived in that place where belief and knowledge meet.

Like Poppa, she had a heartfelt capacity to comfort people, including members of her own family. Especially members of her own family. In those night-time moments of childhood fear, when the thought of Death filled the darkness, she would come into your bedroom and stroke your forehead. Uncle John remembers her gentle voice, “It’s just like going to sleep.” And again, “It’s just like going to sleep. Only you wake up in Heaven.”

In her final minutes, as my Dad stroked her forehead, he turned to the gathered family and said with the strongest voice he could muster, “She loved us so much.”

Nanna was God’s gift to us all, and we are forever blessed to be her family and her friends.

She’s with Poppa in Heaven now, where she was ready to be. Where she’ll never forget she’s got biscuits in the oven, and potatoes on the stove, and she’ll always have a U for her Q.

We love you Nanna.

 

A montage of images can be seen HERE

 

Our heartfelt gratitude goes to everyone involved: Kleemanns Funerals, Pastor Page, the organist Charmaine, the readers Irene and Jane, Bev Paech and her team who put on the afternoon tea, and everyone who came.