Volume 32
Spring-Summer
2006 |
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More than forty years ago, on a cold
February day, I rode along the Susquehanna River for the first time. It was a
bright, sunny morning, and the banks of the
river were draped in a blanket of sparkling snow.
I remember thinking as we traveled through
the area, leaving the river behind, how
breathtakingly beautiful upstate New York was.
We passed through little villages, including
Sydney and Gilbertsville, with chimney smoke
rising above the steep-roofed houses and pine
trees with spatulated branches holding the newly
fallen snow. Someday, I said to myself, I’ll come
back here. In a kind of reverse family migration,
I did.
My grandmother was a little Irish woman,
whose family left the home country to escape
the Irish potato famine. None of our family is
sure just where my great-grandparents landed
in the United States. I was told once that they
came through New Orleans. My mother, who
is ninety-two, knows that my grandmother was
born in Illinois—I’d thought she was born in
Ireland—but that doesn’t rule out New
Orleans. Neither my oldest aunt, Kathleen,
who recently celebrated her hundredth birthday,
nor my aunt, Elizabeth, who is ninety-four,
can recall things with certainty. What we do know
is that, after landing in this country, Grandma’s
parents headed west, stopping in places where
there was work and then moving on, usually
after the birth of another child. By the time
they reached the Midwest, they had twelve
children. Grandma, who was the second oldest
daughter, had little education and married
early—one less mouth to feed.
Her first husband, Edward, died in 1920
while building a home for her and their
daughters. On a hot summer day, he drank
water from a nearby stream, contracted typhoid
fever, and died before the house was completed. The land and the unfinished house were sold,
and Grandma went to work. She was hired as
a housekeeper by a Mr. William Harrison, to
care for his small home in the northeast section
of Kansas City, Missouri. My mother and aunts
tell me that Mr. Harrison wanted to marry
Gram, but she didn’t feel it was proper. Finally,
after scandalized neighbors left a mattress on
Mr. Harrison’s front lawn, Grandma consented,
and they were married in 1923. For all of the
couple’s married life, his stepdaughters, who
loved him dearly, called him Mr. Harrison. By
the time he died in the late 1930s, leaving
Grandma a widow again, another daughter had
been born, and one of the others had sickened
and died.
When I knew Gram, she stood four foot
ten and weighed eighty-five pounds. Once my
mother showed me a picture of Grandma as a
young woman. In those days, she was almost
as round as she was tall, and it was hard for me
to believe that she had looked so different.
My parents divorced when I was an infant,
so sometime before I was a year old, my
mother, brother, and I went to live with
Grandma. There are things a person
remembers, and there are things we are told
so often that they become part of our
memories. Grandma used to tell about caring
for me while my mother went off to work.
My bassinet was lined with newspaper, and
when I woke and moved around, she could
hear the paper crinkling long before I cried
out for attention. Of course, I don’t
remember any of those very early years. I do
remember feeling jealous of my cousin,
Sharon, who was eighteen months younger
than I. Her family didn’t live with Grandma,
and I was certain that Grandma loved her best,
because she saw her less. As we got older,
Sharon always had to go to the bathroom
when it was time to dry dishes—at least that
was my perception of the situation. And,
because she was Grandma’s favorite, she
always got away with it.
Grandma’s life was hard, no two ways about
it. She rode the trolley downtown at night, hat
pin in hand for self-defense if necessary, to scrub
the floors of the office buildings. As a widow
with six daughters, she taught these young
ladies the true meaning of “being on the rag.”
In later years, my Aunt Betty often told of
washing, bleaching, and drying their monthly
rags, since there was no money for store-bought
items. Each girl owned one set of long
underwear, which had to be washed on a scrub
board, then hung up and dried for use again
the next day.
Through the years, Grandma retained some
of her old thrifty habits, even when they were
no longer necessary. Vinegar was my hair rinse
as a child. Not only did it give a shine to my
hair, it also cut any leftover soap residue. There
were no dish soap products in our house.
Grandma had a little cage-like device that held
remnants of bar soap. The cage had handles,
and to get suds to wash dishes, you shook the
thing back and forth in a sink full of water until
you worked up a frothy lather. Sometimes, if
the dishes or pans were particularly greasy, you’d
have to empty the dishwater and start over.
Prior to World War II, this water came ice-cold
from a hand pump built into the counter next
to the kitchen sink. We washed our hair on
Saturday nights, so that we were sparkling for
church the next morning. I vaguely remember
having to use the bath water after Grandma—
no hardship for me, since she never seemed to
get dirty anyway.
Grandma made slips for Sharon (yes, her
again!) and me from flour sacks, which my
Aunt Alice, Sharon’s mother, bought from a local mill. Sometimes we had plain white slips,
but other times the sacks would be patterned,
and we would get slips with beautiful sprigs
of flowers. All of them were made by hand,
because we had no sewing machine. Grandma
taught me to cross-stitch, embroider, turn
collars on men’s shirts, and darn both socks
and stockings. Her stockings were the heavy
cotton variety, held up with cloth-covered
garters, torturous things that were little more
than disguised rubber bands. Those garters
left great indentations on her upper calves,
marks that remained long after she’d removed
her stockings for the evening.
Grandma and I shared a bed for as long as
we lived in her house. She had a high bed that
was a delight for a small child. It was a bed you
truly climbed into, with a headboard as tall as I
was and a dark veneer that matched the rest of
her bedroom furniture. The lady’s dresser had
a long mirror, flanked on each side by small,
delicate drawers with fancy pulls. Each night,
after she knelt to say her prayers—“Ginger, did
you say your prayers?” “Yes, Grandma.”—she
placed her false teeth in a special container on
top of the drawers. Whether or not her teeth
should be blamed, it is no exaggeration to say
that her snoring gave me many a night of
broken sleep. She always told me to shake her
and ask her to turn over, which I soon learned
to do, but it didn’t help. Once she turned, her
snores just shifted to a different key, until I
finally slipped off to sleep myself. It always
amazed me that such a little person could make
such a big noise!
Grandma’s house boasted a number of
special features. Built between her bedroom
and my brother’s were a bathroom and a
closet. The bathroom, no doubt a luxury for
her, was for me somewhat scary with its clawfoot
tub and echoing acoustics. But the
closet—it was a gem! It ran all the way through
from one bedroom to the other. It was long
and dark, but not at all scary. It was a place to
hide, or to play, or to use for spying on my
brother and his friends. All of our hanging
clothes were in there, so if you were hiding,
you had to be very careful. The shelf, far out
of my reach, held ladies’ hats tucked away in
great round boxes. Of course no one, not
even me, went to church without a hat, so
there were a number of boxes up in the darkest
recesses.
The basement was another fascinating
place. Reached by a set of twisting stairs, it
was the nether world of the home. It was
there, through the coal chute window, that
tons of coal rumbled down a metal slide and
into one corner that was specially walled off
to prevent the coal from cascading all over the
basement floor. The wringer washer was
down there, as well. Set on four delicate legs,
the washer had a large tub with an agitator
and a lid. The tub was filled from a hose near
the two rinse sinks. The clothes had to be
pulled out of the washer’s tub and put through
the wringer. Once squeezed of excess water
and soap, they fell into the first rinse tub, where
the washing process continued until
everything had passed through the final rinse
tub. Then they went through the wringer and
dropped into a laundry basket. My brother
and I always wanted to put the clothes through
the wringer, but it was, in truth, a dangerous
activity for children, so we were never allowed
to wring the laundry unless an adult was
around. Over the years many buttons were
crushed or broken, and anything left in a
pocket came through flat and misshapen. In
later years I caught my hair in just such a
washing machine because I remembered too
late the admonition to put my hair up before
using the wringer.
In summer, the wet laundry was hauled upstairs
to the outside clothes lines. In winter,
our clothes hung on rope lines that crisscrossed
the basement, drying into stiff, board-like
things with pinch marks where the clothes pins
had held them. Once dry, they were sorted. Since
socks and underwear were about the only things
that were not ironed, every other item was then
sprinkled with water, rolled, and lined up with
similar items to wait for the ironing board.
The basement also held whole walnuts,
their outer skins still green. Once the skins
had withered, the nuts could be shelled—a
messy job under the best of circumstances.
The shelled walnuts were a real treat and were
used in all sorts of dishes, especially through
the holiday season. The recipe that follows is
one my mother adapted and still uses every
Christmas season.
Food was, of course, of paramount
importance to Grandma. Having done without
for so long, little was wasted or squandered.
The black walnut tree took up most of the sun
and prevented many things from growing, but
during the hot summer months, she always
planted tomatoes along the back fence. I learned
to love them at a very early age. Grandma, as
was typical for older women of that time, wore
an apron over her housedress. Her aprons
usually had quite large pockets, and she always
carried a handkerchief in one pocket and
sometimes a rosary in the other, even if she
was just stepping out to the backyard. Going
out to pick tomatoes also meant picking greens.
She showed us a particular dandelion leaf that,
picked early, is as tasty and tender as any organic
spinach. There was also the occasional
mushroom to find. Morels grew in our area,
and Grandma knew how to find and select
both greens and mushrooms: skills learned
through hardship, not education. As fall
approached, green tomatoes were the order of the day. Yummy soft slices, coated in seasoned
flour and fried in bacon grease, graced our plates
and satisfied our yearning for comfort food.
Eventually my mother married again. We
continued to live with Grandma for a while
under these new circumstances, finally moving
to another house when I was twelve. Our new
house was about two miles away from
Grandma’s, in another parish and a different
community. With the self-absorption of the
young, I often wondered if she was lonely after
we left. While madness and mayhem are going
on, solitude seems like a fine thing; sometimes,
though, silence is very loud. In 1954 I was
caught up in my first year of high school, a
freshman at an all-girls school to which I’d won
a scholarship. Of course we saw Grandma on
Sunday when we picked her up for church, and
there were often Sunday dinners at her house
when various relatives, including Sharon and
her family, dropped by to say hello. And there
was the odd Saturday, when the weather was
good, and I walked the two miles to share
breakfast with her while we listened to the
Hillbilly Hit Parade, ate buckwheat pancakes,
and drank café au lait—always, of course,
without Sharon around to steal the attention!
A few years later, Grandma moved into a
tiny apartment close to my mother’s house. In
1960, she and I took a Greyhound bus from
Kansas City, Missouri, to Santa Monica,
California, to attend my favorite cousin’s
wedding. It was in Santa Monica that I met the
man I would marry the following year. As a
Navy family we moved around the country,
always far away from my grandmother and the
rest of the family. Gram’s transformation from
roly-poly to teeny-tiny was the result of diabetes,
which eventually took her life after I left home.
Today, I try to share with all seven of my
grandchildren times that have nothing to do
with things, but everything to do with feelings.
When Sarah and Casey, who live in Weedsport,
New York, were babies, I started by singing
some of my old camp songs:
“HaggaLenaMaggaLena,” the states song,
“Five Little Ducks,” “Take Me Out to the Ball
Game,” and on and on. They loved them, and
it helped pass the time en route from their
house to mine. Sometimes now, we play hide
the genuine, imitation hidden treasure (a bag
of “pirate” coins I picked up on vacation in
Charleston, South Carolina). We share stories
about their fathers as small children. That’s a
great fun time, because they imagine their dad
getting into trouble, and they have a good laugh
at his expense. They often ask me to tell those
stories as we ride along in the car. Since I can’t
teach Anna, my granddaughter in Oklahoma,
my camp songs in person, I’ve made a tape of
them for her. My daughter Theresa plays them
in their car. I included some family stories in
between songs, so Anna can hear from me just
how smart her mother was as a small child.
When Sarah, my oldest granddaughter, was
small, I purchased a little red-and-green apron
for her to wear while she sat on a stool at my
kitchen table and painted her masterpieces. I
saved large pieces of cardboard or plain paper
for their canvases. Now I share horseback riding
and cross-country skiing with Casey. Julie and
Jake, who live in Liverpool, New York, love to
use a handheld tape recorder to record their
version of “The Today Show with Julie and
Jake, coming to you from Grandma Gin’s
house.”
Both my oldest and youngest children live
far away, one in Washington State and one in
Oklahoma, so I don’t get to see their children
as much as I’d like, but I still try to keep in
contact. I recently returned from a cross-country
trip, after visiting both of them. My son who
is in Washington lives across the street from a
lake. While I was with his family, we did some
good old-fashioned rock skipping. It’s an activity
I remember so well from my own childhood,
so I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Joe
has taught his children, Joseph and Alexis, the
fine art of selecting and then skipping a flat
rock across the water’s surface. Once I arrived
back home, I sent Joe a box of rocks: flat stones
I’d accumulated as I made my way from
Washington to New York. The idea was to
share with him and his family a little piece of
my trip and home, which would become part
of their landscape.
While some of my children and
grandchildren have moved away, I have chosen
to remain here in upstate New York. Most of
my working life has been spent here and now,
in retirement, I find a great deal of pleasure in
owning a very small bookstore in a very small
community, with a view of the hills and snow
scenes that so entranced me many years ago. I
hope to pass this love of place and family on
to all of my grandchildren. My own
grandmother used her talents to teach without
even being aware that she was doing so. Her
songs were Irish ballads, and her “hidden
treasures” were mushrooms and tomatoes. She
loved her home, she loved her children, and I
have no doubt that she loved her grandchildren.
My hope is that my grandchildren will carry in
their hearts the same kind of wonderful
memories of our times together.
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Ginny Scida, a member of the Greater
Tully Writer’s Group, retired as
college accountant from the State
University of New York at Cortland in
1995. She owns and operates a used
bookstore, Bookhounds, in Fabius,
New York. She is a 1976 graduate of
Syracuse University.
Grandma used to tell about caring
for me while my mother went off to work.
My bassinet was lined with newspaper, and
when I woke and moved around, she could
hear the paper crinkling long before I cried
out for attention.
Doris’ Applesauce Cake
1 cup raisins
1/4 cup rum
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup margarine or butter
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 dash nutmeg
2 cups applesauce (or one 16 oz. can or
jar)
2 tsp. baking soda
1 cup chopped black walnuts
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Put raisins
in cup, pour rum over them, and set aside.
Cream sugar and butter. Sift flour,
cinnamon, and nutmeg and set aside. Mix
baking soda into applesauce then add to
sugar and butter mixture. Gradually add
flour mixture and beat until mixed well,
scraping bottom and sides of bowl. Add
raisins, rum, and nuts a little at a time,
mixing well after each addition. Pour into
greased and floured bundt pan and bake
for about 50 minutes, until a toothpick
comes out clean. This cake is very moist!
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This article appeared in Voices Vol. 32, Spring-Summer 2006. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society today.
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