Memories From Childhood

 NATIONAL GRANDPARENTS' DAY !!! September 7:
I was so blessed to know a great-grandmother and a great-grandfather growing up. Both were a real "hoot".
 
> Great-grandfather would take me to the local grocery, set me on the counter to show everyone his great-grandchild BUT . . . only if I was clean and dressed up. This big nosed, bald man loved any old western on television. He went dancing every Saturday night in his pin-stripe suit with watch chain dangling and chewing Black Jack gum. He swallowed a teaspoon of Vicks Vapo Rub every night at bed time. The man lived into his 90's with one kidney.

> Great-grandmother worked as a tailor at a men's store, would take us to the circus and eat cotton candy. She took us to the fair and rode the roller coaster with my brother and the ferris wheel with me. She bought tickets and took us to TV wrestling matches where she would sit on the front row and yell, "Git him, git him!, pin him down!" She was an old lady who never grew old. I will never forget the way she washed our hands - not with a cloth but with her hands. I remember the way she washed my eyes open with a warm cloth, when I had whooping cough.

> Paternal grandmother was a "vamp" singer in the style of Kate Smith and Sophie Tucker was a professed Catholic who never went to church. I remember watching her get ready for an appearance by putting on false nails and lashes, shaving and repainting her eyebrows and using those long metal waving combs to set her hair. She baked the best sugar cookies in the world and always made amazing cakes for our birthdays: dolls in cake dresses, a merry-go-round with animals that carried candles, cars and clowns. At Easter, she turned eggs into dolls. She loved to braid my hair and tie big bows on the ends. Her kitchen drawers were toy chests full of wooden spoons and cookie cutters.

> My mother's mother (my American Indian grandmother) was up at dawn to prime her well pump and hoe the corn before the sun got hot, in a large straw bonnet. She canned the best bread and butter pickles and let me eat all I wanted. There was a metal bucket of water in the kitchen with a rusty ladel that everyone use. She always had a black cat around - said they were lucky. Her outhouse had a wasp nest at the door and - two seats - ? I climbed her apple tree with a salt shaker and ate until I was sick. I sat in the limbs of the mulberry tree, overhanging the road, and flicked little green spiders off the berries to eat them as cars passed below. (Mother would have whipped me if she knew.) I ran her corn fields until dark, playing with kids across the road. I remember warm baths in a galvanized tub beside her pot belly stove while she poured baking soda water over my chicken pocks. And, she had the gentlest stroke when brushing my hair and relating Indian folktales. We ate diabetic ice cream and she always let me run free. She was my favorite.

> Grandfather said she didn't know how to boil water when he married her. They separated before I remember. He was a house painter and when my father left, grandfather moved in to be chief cook and babysitter while mother worked. He practiced tough love and taught me to cipher, cook, look people in the eye, shake a firm hand, stand up straight, color mixing and how to run a chalk line. He played the harmonica and spoons and we danced with abandon. We cleaned wallpaper with putty, painted the walls every two years and I listened in awe to his childhood stories of a one room school house he walked to in his bare feet in 12 inches of snow - up hill both ways. No one messed with his grandkids and we adored him to pieces.

I do not remember any of them ever going to church on Sundays. The Indian grandmother is the only one I know of who read the Bible. God provided a rich heritage and some great memories.

A Two-Seater Outhouse

 

I hope for nothing, I fear nothing - I am free

 

Life is the dream from which we wake to the reality of death.

 

Summers with my maternal grandmother are some of my most treasured memories: corn fields, rabbit hutch, well water, coal heater and pickles.

 

She lived in the country in a long house covered with roofing shingles that looked like red brick, with a crawl space that set the house up on cinder blocks. Overhanging the road was a large mulberry tree, and a sour apple tree grew beside the dirt driveway.

 

So many wonderful memories retained all these years later, play like a picture album across my mind. There was the red checkered tablecloth with condiments in the center, her bed that sagged in the middle and the black cat under the coal burning, cast iron heater. This all-too-brief time in my life leaves me with wonderful food for peaceful daydreams.

 

> Her well water was a favorite drink of mine and I remember her saving enough at night for priming the pump, next morning, in the winter to get it started.

 

> There was a two-seater outhouse that I never did understand. I cannot imagine sitting in passing conversation with a fellow traveler. Under the eaves of the outhouse was a wasp nest that always gave me cause for concern. I remember my youngest uncle's rabbit hutch and the glorious cornfield that she hoed every morning at 5 a.m. in her straw sunbonnet. I was always excited to help.

 

> Inside the house, the kitchen held the galvanized metal water bucket with the rusty enamel ladle everyone shared for a quick sip. There were two cast iron heating stoves, one in the eating area, the other in the living room at the other end of the house. This one served to heat the two upstairs bedrooms in the winter because heat rises. In between was her bedroom and a makeshift pantry with a curtain that hid the shelves of canned goods.

 

Aunt, Grandmother, Mother

 

> The two bedrooms upstairs had beds heaped with blankets in the winter. One bedroom was occupied by my mother's youngest brother with the other generally reserved for visiting grandchildren. Behind the heater in the eating area was a fourth bedroom reserved for one of my older cousins who stayed more with grandmother than her own mother. In a small mud room off the back of the kitchen was the bucket used when it was not convenient to trek off to the outhouse. That was one cold metal bucket that left a ring around your butt if you sat on it. And, you better sit down squarely if you didn't want an overturned bucket.

 

> Grandmother had been an only child and wanted a large family. She lost three children at birth, two were twins. Nine babies survived that she and Grandfather raised through the Great Depression.

 

> I loved visiting. One summer, Mother called to ask if she would get to see me before school school resumed. "Are you ever coming home?" Every opportunity to visit Grandmother was accepted with great enthusiasm. Her country residence was always an adventure of monumental proportions. Every bit of it was adventure to this city girl and Grandmother was in her element with grandchildren around.

 

To be continued  . . . . . 

* This autobiography begins with "An Ordinary Childhood" posted Dec. 30, 2024