Reflections on Love and the Women Who Shape Our Lives

This month, our Women’s Writing Circle is celebrating love with a Goodreads Giveaway for our anthology, Moments of Love, which runs until February 17. We are giving away 100 Kindle copies of the book, and I hope you will enter our giveaway.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Moments of Love

by Susan G. Weidener

Giveaway ends February 16, 2026.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

It has me thinking about all the ways love appears in our book. We have stories of friendship and faith, of international trips that led to encounters of loss and renewal, and a look at the beauty of our landscape and the challenges of marriage. I wrote three pieces about love, but there are so many more stories I could have shared. Love has always been at the center of my writing. As the Victorian poet Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote: “To love or have loved, that is enough. Demand nothing more.”

***

My thoughts frequently return to my grandmother, whom I have written about before. She spent much of her life as a widow, and I often reflect on everything she endured alone. Although she passed away when I was just five years old, her legacy has profoundly impacted my life.

My grandmother, Annie Beatrice Dean Weidener.

I vaguely remember her brick twin house on Maplewood Avenue in the Germantown section of Philadelphia…the lace doilies on the pie-crust mahogany table in her sitting room with a view of rhododendron and azaleas. The small chair with a blue embroidered cushion that now sits in my bedroom. In my mind’s eyes, I see china tea cups decorated with small purple violets and a tabby cat purring on the windowsill. I smell the sugary sweet vanilla of freshly baked scones with raspberry jam served in a small dish with a silver spoon. This memory transformed into a moment of love, or something that in a strangely powerful way evoked romance and family legacy that lingers to this day.

But her life was hardly that of the woman often pictured in English drawing rooms, sipping on her tea.

I knew her as Nanny, that quintessentially British word for grandmother. She immigrated to Pennsylvania from Manchester, England, in the early 20th century. I have no diaries, no records, just sepia-toned photographs of a woman with pale brown hair, wearing ebony beads, and whose eyes remind me of my own. But I know that Nanny defied expectations, a woman fearless enough to cross a vast ocean and start a new life in Pennsylvania, whose wooded green acres and rocky riverbanks reminded her of England.

She was the influence who made my father believe that a woman could, and should, have every right to success as a man. She is the reason, as the daughter of an enlightened father, I married a man who believed in me and loved me unconditionally—who boasted about my accomplishments to anyone who would listen and encouraged me to be strong.

Role models offer examples of accomplishment, fortitude, and bravery.

Through my work as a journalist, writing teacher, and author, I’ve had the privilege of meeting remarkable women who have led school districts, written influential books, and traveled extensively to assist the poor and disenfranchised. I interviewed one of the first women ordained as an Episcopal priest and a grieving mother who established a nonprofit organization following the tragic death of her son from a rare disease. Like my grandmother, Nanny, I suppose you could say they have been my role models. When people enter our lives, often by chance, and inspire us to believe in the possibilities within ourselves, we come to understand love.

Nanny married my grandfather, Andrew Weidener, and bore her only child, my father, also named Andrew. They married on Valentine’s Day. My grandfather traveled as a marketing man for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and he left home for weeks at a time, traveling by rail to Pittsburgh and back. Stress and cigarettes killed him when he suffered a massive heart attack at the age of fifty-nine. After he died, Nanny took in boarders to support herself. She taught my father to believe that a woman can survive on her own; a lesson he passed on to me.

As her only granddaughter, perhaps I romanticize her story. Or maybe I want to believe that she is proof, in my own family, that a woman can defy the odds.

Final postscript

Nanny was about to move in with my parents when she met a man named Jones, a widower who lived on Maplewood Avenue. Although she claimed she was seventy-four, her vanity—or perhaps her awareness that women are judged differently than men regarding age—led her to shave a few years off her actual age when asked. Mr. Jones proposed, and she accepted. Shortly after they announced their engagement, Nanny was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

When people ask if there is one person you could have dinner with—living or dead—I always think of Nanny. I imagine us laughing about life and the trials and triumphs of widowhood, sipping lemon-flavored tea from those delicate teacups with violets, her cat purring on the windowsill in the house on Maplewood Avenue. I think of how we share that a woman can’t depend on anyone but herself…and yet, the unexpected, and the possibility of new love—the beauty of being open to new possibilities awaits around every corner, even until the very end.

***

I invite you to remember and write about a strong woman in your life, someone who helped shape who you are. Consider reading your story and hers to someone else and sharing it together.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Moments of Love

by Susan G. Weidener

Giveaway ends February 16, 2026.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway