At Grandma's house, you learned not to take things for granted.
There was no indoor plumbing. We used an outhouse, overgrown with honeysuckle, during the day, and chamberpots from the cupboard under the washstand at night.
When we wanted a drink of water, we had to use all our small strength to wield the handle of the pump until cold water tasting deliciously of iron gushed out into the tin cup hanging beside it. It took much more pumping to fill the galvanized metal tub in which we children were bathed occasionally, sometimes two at a time.
Grandma's house had electricity, but I remember, at least in the early years of our visits, a large white ice box, cooled by an enormous translucent block of ice. The rugs on the floor were braided from strips of cotton clothing too worn to wear with decency; and Grandma, using the skill she had developed by sewing all the clothes for her growing family, made miniature versions of my worn-out dresses for my dolls.
Firewood from a fragrant woodshed attached to the house provided the energy for heating and cooking. A woodstove warmed each room in cool weather, and the big black cooking stove in the kitchen produced griddle cakes which have made all pancakes since then pale in comparison.
We thought that even the toys were exotically old-fashioned. With a small collection of small stone architectural blocks, colored blue, terra cotta, and cream, we built wondrous castles. We pored over yellowed Child Life magazines from the 1930s. A pin-bagatelle game with heavy metal balls lured me to sample one when I was small. The doctor advised my mother, "Don't worry; it will come out in the morning," and I assume it did, since I am here to tell the tale.
Outdoors, we were left to our own pursuits: exploring the barn; building houses of straw and grass in the adjoining fields; creeping into the vegetable garden with a salt cellar, which we used discreetly on newly plucked leaves of lettuce; playing with the garter snake that slithered across the front steps.
Visiting grandma took us back in history--exciting for us, although I suspect that our parents, struggling to do a family's laundry with water heated on a wood stove, found the journey challenging and fatiguing. Through our visits to Grandma's house, part of our lives touched the preceding century.
It was not only the sense of living in another era that enchanted us as children, however. It was Grandma Percy herself. Grandma almost always had time for us, despite what she called her "chores." The widow of a Baptist preacher, artist, and poet, Grandma was both preacher and poet in her own right. She loved to gather the grandchildren and set off like a pied piper into the woods. There, she would begin to weave her stories--about elves under toadstools, fairies in the violets, and woodland spirits in the trees. She convinced us that nature was filled with unseen wonders.
Grandma, a diminutive and frail woman, had lived a hard life, losing four of her eight children to illness or accident. She and my grandfather had raised the remaining four with a dearth of money and a plethora of love. When my mother was young, her principle Christmas gift was a hand-made booklet, carefully sewn together at the spine, which contained my Grandfather's poetry and drawings and was designed especially for her.
These frugal, imaginative, strong, loving grandparents left me a legacy, both through their lives and through my mother's. For my mother's values were irrevocably shaped by parents with rich interior lives who knew their dependence on the earth's cycles and resources. In the less affluent--and less hectic--time in which they lived, it was perhaps easier to appreciate the simple delights of day to day life, such as storytelling. Time and time again, we would beg Mother to "tell us a story about when you were a little girl." Our favorite was the story of her cousins finding a "kitty" in the woods and bringing it home to their mother, who was having tea with her friends in the parlor. The kitty turned out to be a skunk.
My grandmother and mother were part of both my biological and my ecological family tree. They did not know it, but they were teaching me environmental awareness. Their lives were firmly grounded in the belief that happiness is found not in material wealth but in relationship, and they passed on these values to us through word and through example.
When our own children were born, I began to ask questions. What kind of world would they inherit? If they were to have children, what kind of world would they live in? This was when I first recognized that I draw strength from the other end of the family tree--not the past, but the future. When I am tempted to despair, I find it is my own children now who point the way to hope.
Watching them as they grew, I found my own wonder reawakened as they discovered the world around them. Their play--hiding in leaf piles, building snow forts, seeking crickets on a summer evening with a flashlight, splashing in a New Hampshire lake--beckoned me back to my own childhood experience of nature. I have followed from afar, attentively (and prayerfully!) trying hard not to meddle, as they have experienced various relationships, from their companionship with schoolmates during kindergarten recess, to childhood baseball and soccer teams, the adventures of academia, and entry into an adult world ripe for exploration.
One son has followed the calling of a professional musician. With his wife, he is part of a community of sound with other orchestral or chamber musicians, as they contribute to the happiness and well-being of the human community.
Our other son creates another kind of harmony, through his membership in the environmental community at Lost Valley, where he teaches organic gardening, edits this nationally distributed environmental magazine, and continues to enlighten and educate his parents.
My grandmother's legacy continues, as the family tree, rooted in her life-giving values, reaches out towards life in the 21st century--a century when those values, far from being outdated, are the only hope for the future both of the human race and the planet itself.
Nancy Roth is a writer, dancer, musician, Episcopal priest, and, most importantly, mother, who hopes that her legacy will, like her grandmother's, be life-giving to the family tree. She lives in Oberlin, Ohio, with her husband, a retired musician.
©2000* Talking Leaves
Spring/Summer 2000
Volume 10, Number 1
Listening to Elders and Children