Just as people say that the most beautiful baby in the world is their grandchild, I say that one of the most beautiful older women to have graced this planet was my grandmother.

 Meet Melusina Bernhardina(sp?) Dorothea(sp) Nordmeyer Seehausen, seen here when she may have been about sixty.   The youngest of thirteen children, people said to her father, Henry Nordmeyer, “She is lovely.  You’ll have to keep her at home with you”, as he was heading into his older years.   He said, “No, she is going to have a life.”  After some training in singing, it is said that her voice teacher cried when she left her training to marry.  This was her choice.

 Always involved, she originated an art program in the  public high school, wherein reproductions of pictures by famous artists were placed along the hallways.  The funding that she found for this came from recycling newspapers.  Earlier, she painted this self-portrait of herself as a young woman.

When I was a rather arrogant, fresh-water biology graduate student, and I noticed how observant she was, I said to her, “You could have been a scientist.”  She just chuckled.  Now I know how hard-working her family had always been.  Of course, she had the capacity to have become a scientist, had she wanted to, and had she had the opportunity.