I suppose I should have sat down and written this yesterday since that was the anniversary of my grandmother's passing. But there wasn't time, and incidentally, "A Score and a Day" sounds nicer than just "A Score," don't you think?
Anyway, yesterday marked twenty years since my grandma died. Grandma Libby. She was barely five feet tall and one hundred pounds after a good dinner (and we had lots of those). She was the measuring stick for all of the grandkids, and I outgrew her by about six inches before she died. She and Grandpa lived on the farm next door, and we saw them most everyday in the summer, though less often during the school year.
I was fifteen, so close to sixteen. I had longed to get my driver's license for years so that I could drive Grandma wherever she needed to go. She never drove due to a health condition, but I couldn't wait until I could take her to the bank or the store when she needed to go. But she died a few short weeks before my learner's permit arrived in the mail.
We couldn't believe it when she got sick. She wasn't the one smoking a pack a day and in and out of the hospital for so many of the years we remembered. But the cancer moved fast, and she was gone a few months later. We knew it was coming there at the end, but I still remember the middle of the night call saying she was gone.
We wept, all of us together. There were five of us cousins who spent our free time together at the farm sandwiched between our houses. That summer was different than the rest because we knew that Grandma's time with us was shortening quickly. And we sat together on the front porch and cried our eyes out, the boys too.
I remember dreading the funeral. And I'm fairly certain that I went through an entire box of tissues that day. I remember, too, that I was allowed to choose a few of the hymns that we sang, and I tried to pick the favorites that Grandma used to play and sing as I sat beside her on the old black piano bench in the living room. "When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder" and "In My Heart There Rings a Melody" come to mind, though I can't say for certain now if they were the ones that were sung in the service. I remember her belting them out, though, and I can almost see her fingers dancing across the black and white keyboard, her face reflected in the mirror above the hymnal. My love of music and interest in the piano came from the many hours at her side singing old hymns, and I still have her old green, falling-apart, taped-together, scribbled-in hymnal. And I can hardly sing "Victory in Jesus" without hearing her voice in my mind and tears overflowing.
Somehow later that day I went and played a field hockey game. It was the county tournament...and a pretty big deal. But as I look back, it seems to me that celebrating Grandma should have been a bigger deal, and I should have stayed with the family.
There are so many memories that come into my mind when I start to think back...many of them in her kitchen. Making homemade ice cream. Turkey dinners with all the fixings. Watching her peel an apple without breaking the peel once. Drinking iced tea out of her old margarine-container-cups. Jelly beans in the candy dish. My first taste of a chicken heart from the pot on the stove (it was good!). Screeching as Grandma smashed bugs with her fingers. Peaches in Cheerios and milk for breakfast. Listening to the story of how she and Grandpa got together (it had something to do with a snowball that she threw at him). Her knee-slapping laugh when she allowed my brother and sister to attempt some sort of scientific experiment that exploded all over the place. Drawing the farm for me - over and over and over. Looking at her road-atlas and circling all of the places I'd ever heard of. (I still love maps.) Barging in through the over-sized back-porch door and finding her sitting on the green vinyl couch in the kitchen with her Bible open in her lap and her head down praying.
I wish my kids could have known her and Grandpa. They knew what hard work really is, running a farm. I can't give thanks enough for the opportunities we had to grow up there next to them. It wasn't a hard-working farm by the time we kids came along because Grandpa wasn't running the farm anymore, but there was still plenty to do with a few cows and some pigs. And we learned work and play. Running in the fields, tramping through the woods, playing under the bridge, feeding baby calves and piglets, cleaning out their pens, hauling wood, jumping around in the hay mows, painting wooden fences, fishing for minnows and storing them in the spring under the house until it was time to go fishing with Grandpa.
Living in affluent suburbia has its benefits, I suppose, but living close to the earth isn't one of them. There's little dependence on the weather here. We don't see the effects of rain and wind and sun on what we'll eat this coming year. But we could see it on the farm. We overheard the adults talking of drought; we could see it out the front window of the house - stunted stalks of corn or oats lining the fields. Or sometimes the rain would flood the fields and even the house. Once we scraped an inch of mud from the floor after a heavy rain brought nearly four feet of water into the basement by way of the spring that ran under the house and the stream that flowed behind the house.
I wish my kids had more of those kind of experiences. I wish they could see that a morning of hard work is more than just having to pull weeds on the south side of the house, and I wish that they'd have the chance to let their imaginations run wild in a meadow where two streams met and flowed away under the bridge...to climb tall pine trees with sticky branches and play hide and seek in an old barn and to come home with muddy shoes every single day of the summer.
Okay, part of me wishes for all of that. And part of me likes the nice, safe, clean world we've put our children in. But I know that it was those crazy, wild experiences of my childhood that made it so wonderful. And it was the down-to-earth perspective of a farm family that gave us the opportunity to enjoy childhood and grow our imaginations.
Well, I didn't really intend to write so much, but now that the kids are in bed and I have some time...the words and memories are overflowing.
There are more memories I could share, but for now I'm just going to recommend the latest book that I'm reading. Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child by Anthony Esolen. Excellent. Convicting. Inspiring. And I'm only in chapter 4! I got a copy from the library, but this is one I might have to buy for myself.
To sum it up, Esolen offers ten methods that we can employ to destroy the imaginations of our children. His writing style is witty and very enjoyable - even if I do have to remind myself continually that he's writing tongue-in-cheek. The book has served to make me even more thankful for the childhood I experienced in the country next door to a farm.
It wasn't perfect, but it sure was good.
But the house has been owned by his grandmother's family for the last almost-one-hundred years, and Stephen's aunt lives next door still. Over the years, she (his aunt) has passed down lots of attic-finds and old pictures as well as a number of pieces of furniture that Grandpa had owned. Recently, she gave him the old wooden box that Grandpa had used to pack dynamite for Dupont for many, many years. It's on the shelf in our foyer now.
