Grandparent Memories

 I’m glad I was raised with grandparents who were born in 1875 and 1879(both great grandmas) and 1898 (both grandpas) and 1908 (mom’s mom) they didn’t change much in the things they considered essential as they aged. The never had, so why do I need now list; included electricity, and indoor plumbing, and a phone, or TV. There was a wood cook stove with a built in rectangular reservoir for hot water, coal burner for heat, outhouse, thunder mug under the bed, and buckets of water with a washboard and wringer for laundry. Gardening and bartering and auctions and canning and drying and sewing and quilting were daily things. I thought it was weird but nowadays my own list of never had, don’t need dates me just as completely - no dishwasher in this house. 

My grandpa was born in 1898 and my grandma in 1908 and this is how my grandma responded to everything. Show her some gloom and doom prediction and she’d list several other times people thought the world was ending. Laugh at a haircut and she reminded my mom that she once cut her hair into a Mohawk and dyed it red with mercurochrome. Show her the Pacific Ocean and she says Yellowstone Lake is about the same thing, take her to the redwoods and she grumps, “they don’t look red to me.” If I ever said “I wish it was the weekend (or my birthday, summer or Christmas)” she would counter with, “don’t wish your life away.”

And now she has been dead since 1989 and I still hear her voice telling me there is nothing new under the sun and this too, will pass, faster than you want it to.

One morning when I was about four I went out to the rabbit hutch we had next to the kitchen porch for my pet bunnies. The rabbits were gone and our American badger was inside snarling. At me. I ran inside, my grandpa went out, and somehow, for the rest of my childhood there was a tanned badger pelt with long claws clicking against the wood on my child sized rocking chair’s back spindles.

My mom’s paternal grandmother was born among the Sioux in 1875 and died in 1973 when I was ten after sharing my bedroom the last two years of her life. The family talked much about her and her husband homesteading and driving stage for Buffalo Bill but I never even heard about the Pine Ridge Reservation relatives until they came for her funeral. I can’t imagine the changes in her life, but since no one talked, I have to. Born and living there through both Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee, then married at 17 to a white stage driver and disowned by her dad for marrying a white man, so unable to visit her mom until she was 57 and her Dad died. Moving to Cody, Wyoming before there was a town and raising four sons and living to be 98. How different the world she arrived in than the one she left.

My maternal grandmother never got over growing up in a farm family of eight kids, all born around 1898 to 1908. And never forgot storing things when they were abundant, to use year round. So when the fields were bursting, she had her own crops but teamed up with mom and her cousins to share their crops and labor.

Emma Belle Lafferty and Frances Ralbon Slack

Lawrence Slack

Emerson Miller and my brother Lance

Lawrence Slack T age 17

We made sauerkraut, braided onions and garlic, canned so many types of beans, corn, pickles and tomato. And then everyone had more than what they had grown themselves in their “root cellar.”  They didn’t dry or smoke much when I was a child. And I’m not sure why, but suspect they felt indulgent using the freezer for those items like meat and fruit. Or canning jelly, and applesauce and pie cherries. I don’t do anything like the volume they did, but we trade our apples and pears and plums for garden goods and can some things. And keeping water here is essential as power cuts my well, many times we’ve figured out a way to get water from the well without the pump but never installed a hand pump on the kitchen sink which several of my family members had. Here we closed schools a month ago, and people shopped like it was tsunami season, and a bunch of items haven’t come back yet, but I have a big order in for today at curbside pickup and we could have gone another month before filling that if I wasn’t getting specifics for three birthdays and Easter. Ugh, sorry. Once again I’m rambling.