Writing a set of poems about my Grandma J, I've been surprised to find myself sad. I've grown to think of her as a particularly bright spot in my life--a woman so very different from myself and yet so happy to share her life with me and others. I am a careful, pastelly kind of person. She was vivid--feisty, even--vocal and quick to laugh. She seemed so much more interested in doing things than in fretting over them, and I never saw perfectionism's fist prints in her kingdom. While she made beautiful quilts and feasts and jellies, they had a kind of easy exuberance rather than strained precision. She and Grandpa lived a love story to the end. Their picture rests on my desk--an elderly couple plunked on the couch, holding hands and laughing into the camera--a symbol of some kind of unbridled joy. Hot cocoa in a V8 world. Something that doesn't sting.

So I am surprised at this sadness, and at this tardy welling of tears that didn't surface when my grandparents died four years ago. I wanted to remember Grandma in all her colors, and to joy over her with the eloquence that only comes to me when I've found a tender distance from former heart-wrenchings. I do not know if I will finish the poems, but I hope to.

Merry Little Notes

"Did you learn to whistle from a man?" the teacher asked me. I served as the aide in her classroom and would sometimes whistle while getting ready for the day. "Yes," I replied, "my dad whistled, and I guess I picked it up from him."

But that was just the near end of the story's thread. In the days of the maxim "whistling girls and crowing hens both come to some bad end," the girl who would grow to become Dad's mother and my spunky grandma donned her big brother's overalls, engaged in BB gun wars, and whistled. I don't know if her father (Great-Grandpa N)whistled, but his sister G. recorded the following in reminisces concerning my great-great-grandmother (who was born in the mid 1800s):

"[Mama] had a high soprano voice and she could also whistle. One time she and another girl had a whistling part in a piece, but the other girl backed out and wouldn't go through with her part. Mama whistled her part in spite of others trying to distract her or get her to laugh. Her brothers F. and B. also whistled a lot, so it must have been a family trait."

I remember my own dad's whistle with pleasure mingled with sadness--pleasure because of its fine gladness and shared connection, sadness because I cannot truly remember its sound. Even while Dad was still living and I heard his whistling often, the sweetness of it could still take me by surprise. It was a spontaneous, joyous thing--not at all raucous or shrill. My last distinct memory of listening to Dad's whistle was on my sister's birthday,three months before he died of cancer. He walked out near the chicken house that day and admired my Silver Spangled Hamburg flock with me. The green lawn highlighted the chickens delicate shapes and bold black and white markings.

In addition to melodies, Dad also whistled bird calls. He taught me the cardinal's, and we used it to hail one another when he came to pick me up at the plant nursery where I worked during high school. My sister and I still use this method to catch each other's attention. Because the only entrance to our upstairs apartment is the downstairs backdoor of our landlords' home, banging on said door may go unnoticed by the one upstairs while disturbing the landlords below. In loo of knocking, therefor, we crane our necks toward the upstairs window and shrill like demented cardinals until the one upstairs comes down, grinning, to unlock the door.

Every family has its melodies in a minor key. In the face of my own, I find the long, airy stream of merry little notes a unique blessing.

Aunt R-M's letter to my sister (then 10 yrs. old) in reply to a request for family information

Dear E;

I've decided what pages I should have copied for you and will go down to bank soon.
I've read and read and can't see any place telling the origins of the [family surname]. [ . . . .]
The M.s came from Ireland as you can see by the enclosed copies.
It mentions A. B. who came to America with her sister. [Your grandma] said Sunday, she thought they were twins but I think only sisters. Somehow they became separated and she never ever saw the sister again. [ . . . . ] Because of [this], we have distant cousins of which we know nothing.
Have been writing all kinds of St. Pat letters. Have house all decorated for two times I will entertain this month. Sunday Bud, J and I had dessert here and all off of Great Grand-mother H.'s dishes which date 1803--green Bramble pattern. Don't think they were impressed but I loved using the dishes.

Love,
R.M.

Great-Aunt R-M

This is one of my great-aunts on Mom's side of the family. I remember Great-Aunt R-M as a rather delicate elderly woman of inherent elegance mingled with the decency and reserve of the rural Midwest. The first photograph above was taken on her baby brother's [my grandpa's] eightieth birthday. The delicate fabric of her dress and her matching jewelry capture Aunt R-M's attention to tasteful and lovely attire.

The next photographs picture another birthday party, one that occurred a number of years earlier. Aunt R-M prepared a celebration for my sister complete with a delicate pink theme, fragile dishes, and a singing candle. I also remember green grapes served with a fluffy white cream--to my little girl sensibilities, that dish captured delight and refinement. The party with it's exquisite food and place settings lingers in my memory amidst a rosy aura of pink lemonade in old glass goblets.

Great-Grandpa

My great-grandpa (shown here with his daughter,my grandma; his grandson, my dad; and his great-granddaughter, my sister) lived through the entire 20th century. Born in 1897, he died in 2000--just 18 days shy of his 103 birthday. At that time he had four children, 17 grandchildren, 46 great-grandchildren, and 19 great-great-grandchildren. He was a godly, gentle man whom I saw only rarely due to the distance between Oklahoma and Illinois. Mostly, I remember his long, cherishing hugs.

Although he moved to Oklahoma Territory when he was three, Great-Grandpa was born in Nebraska. His sister Grace wrote of his birth: "I thought they dug him up from under a tree."

Considering Heritage

Family heritage is an elliptical thing. It comes to us in abbreviated shards of spidery handwriting--terse, and for all that (or because of that), more than half mystery. As its narrative approaches one's own particular page, its characters grow round, dynamic and multifaceted. Grandparents lift young faces to a black and white world, lips curved in the same smile we still see when they rouse themselves from armchair dozes. Aunts and uncles wait in chubby lines, infant eyes wide, captured in a kind of prolonged vulnerability. Watching them, we feel the tug of invisible threads. Sometimes we wish to snap free. Yet somehow we can't. The connection copies itself in every cell. For these are our stories--or rather, the stories in which we have been placed.