Grammie

My grandmother mounts her own private rebellion against healthy living by feeding her cats heavy cream.  They have, of course, blown up like balloons and can barely move, but she seems content in the knowledge that someone can enjoy a high fat diet.  Cats have nine lives after all.

Unlike many older people I know who fear germs, my Grammie seems to seek out situations where they fester.  She reads to first graders each week in the public school system.  She allows the obese felines to walk on the tables and feeds them on the counter tops. 

“Cats are always cleaning themselves,” she informs me.

“Yes, with the same tongues that just licked that dead bird outside,” I point out. 

She doesn’t appreciate my sarcasm or newfound appreciation for cleanliness (apparently I wasn’t like this as a child – I could go a whole week without a shower “it’s good dirt!”).  She insists on putting her vegetable peels and other compost materials into an empty juice box next to the sink to put out in the garden at some undefined point in the future.  Many of these habits which may appear harmless in your sixties manifest themselves as much more dangerous activities in your eighties and nineties.  A compost box that used to get emptied daily (back when composting was not trendy) can now sit for weeks generating penicillin.  Cookies that were lovingly hand made in 1995 and stored in that lively place called the freezer, find their way innocently to the dessert buffet at family Christmas gatherings. I think she figures she has made it this far, through much worse things than mold, and so be it.

I was blessed to have the most picturesque, Norman Rockwell grandmother.  She could create a mouth-watering pot roast, accompanied by homemade applesauce from the apples in her orchard.  She served dessert after every dinner, and she ALWAYS had homemade cookies around.  She sent them to me for holiday treats well into her 80’s.  She and my grandfather maintained a huge garden and orchard with abundant fruits and vegetables that we joyfully picked for healthy summer meals.  And when summer ended, we still enjoyed those veggies and fruits because she canned them herself.  All of this while she worked as a nurse until she was 70!  She thought that bathing (at least for us kids) was highly overrated and instead we would hose down at the end of a long day playing in the yard.  She also thought that apple pie (which she made from scratch of course) was a perfectly suitable breakfast food.  In essence, she was the perfect grandmother, who created the quintessential grandchild environment.

With all of this care and fine living, I had one question that kept nagging at me.  How could my mother have emerged from the loins of this wonder woman?  Were they even related?  My mother struggled to make spaghetti (and I do mean spaghetti, no venturing into the creative likes of rotini or farfelle) a few nights a week.  She also came up with the preposterous idea that carob was a treat comparable to chocolate, but better because it wouldn’t turn my brother and I into “candy monsters”.  My mother couldn’t grow grass in our yard, let alone a juicy apple or crunchy ear of corn.  We were surrounded by half dead plants that she was attempting to “revive”.  My grandmother was largely un-phased by our childhood naughtiness.  My mother practically had a heart attack when I ripped my jeans or spilled juice on the couch.

My mother, as all good mothers do, dressed me in dresses and skirts when I was a toddler.  I stayed with my grandparents while my parents went to the hospital to have my brother.  I am told that two appalling events took place during their absence:  1) I fell down the stairs (my grandmother dusted me off and declared that “I would live”) and 2) my grandmother dressed me, in all things, OVERALLS.

My grandmother grew up on a farm in Western Connecticut.  She had three younger brothers, horses, chickens, and assorted other stray animals.  She was quite a tomboy and lived to run and play with her siblings. The house where she grew up had a secret room in the attic where they hid slaves who were escaping from the south along the underground railroad.  I always found it fascinating that my family participated in such good-intentioned yet risky behavior.  My great- great grandmother was one of the first women doctors in CT and my great grandmother, grandmother, and mother were all nurses.  I never had the Nightingale calling.

I uncovered these exciting facts through long talks with my grandmother, and many summer days spent rummaging in the attic, sweat dripping down my hairline.  I could spend countless hours in the attic, comfortable in the company of my deceased ancestors and their relics.  Which leads me to the concept of The Yankee Clutter Mentality.  After coming to the new world, but before slaughtering the Indians, desperate times were among the puritans.  They learned to scrimp and save every bit of food, wood, water, tinfoil, and threadbare sock imaginable.  The penny saving ways never left the stodgy New Englander.  Eventually, after they got what they needed from the Indians and killed them, they learned to build bigger houses, but closed ¾ of them off to save heat.  Just as they started to feel more confident in their crops, there was a war, and then another.  Darn life was unpredictable!  Better keep a full pantry, re-use tin foil and plastic bags, and store water in old jugs in the basement in case of emergency.

And so the legacy of clutter began in my family (see related Blog -”A Girl and Her Mother”).  This is a trait I am trying to bring to a suitable close in my family history.  I have to fight the urge to save everything as generations of pile-makers course through my veins.  Occasionally I fret that I won’t leave any antiquities for my children and grandchildren to sort through, but then I am sated to know that my mom and grandmother have collected enough “heirlooms” to satisfy centuries of historical curiosity.