Would it be easier to write if I was a novelist? Would the keyboard be more welcoming if I was stepping into an imagined world of my own making? One that I’d been building for weeks, months, or years?
Over the weekend I occupied myself by putting my “porch” together. It’s one end of the deck that has a roof covering. Chairs and tables brought down from the barn loft. Pots of ivy that I successfully wintered over in my dining room now hang in rusty, whimsical metal plant hangers. Grandma Mills’ and Grandma Murphy’s plants have been pulled from their stands in the living room and from the table in the dining room to summer in the shade of the porch-deck. The two matriarchal plants loom large; they were the first to claim space in this porch design. Then all the smaller plants, most broken off from Grandma Mills’ Christmas cactus, fill in around them.
Grandma Mills’ Christmas cactus, approx. 150 years old… stubborn & bloom-less.
Grandma Murphy’s mother-in-law tongue… keeps adding to the family with new spikes.
I couldn’t find the two table coverings for the square metal table-for-two and the square wooden “coffee” table in the middle of the porch. They weren’t in the special linen pile in the office closet; nor were they in the true “linen closet” upstairs. They weren’t in the linen chests in the dining room. That adage “everything has a place and everything in its place” struggles in my Malcolm organization. Much the way my mind misfiles information.
While digging to the bottom of the chests in the dining room, I fumble past small runners and table clothes that I never use. As my fingers brush over them, nostalgia seeps through my skin. They had belonged to my mom’s grandma/my great-grandma, Grandma Whittier, and my dad’s mom/my grandma, Grandma Mills. How would my grandmothers perceive this dystopian landscape? Living most of their lives on farms, their lives were tightly sewn to tasks at hand on any given day. Chores guided by the seasons.
Throughout the year of 1966, my great grandma, who by then had left the farm and, in her 70s, was living in town, baked kolaches, pies, and cakes; tore and sewed carpet rags; mended clothing for her children and grandchildren; and went to church many days a week. But then in the late spring and summer, her diary entries pointed to the season: washed some windows on the outside; mowed lawn; shelled and froze first peas; looked over a lot of lettuce.
And in mid-July of 1966, she wrote that she met me for the first time when I was three days old, probably as Mom and Dad were taking me home from the hospital. I like to imagine that this was the tradition for grand babies born locally: On their way home from the hospital, they were driven two minutes from the hospital and, with one left turn onto 5th Avenue NE, arrived at a small white house with a screened front porch -- to meet Grandpa and Grandma Whitter.
Then in the next few days, Grandma got on with making rhubarb juice; cleaning and cooking apples; washing and canning peaches; making apple and plum butter; and shelling a lot of beans. And interspersed throughout all of her daily entries were visits with family and friends. Tucked into summer days of making salads and glorified rice and winter days of making banana bread and cracking and picking out nuts.
My great grandma documented all of her days in what she did. No emotions or feelings, which leads me to define this original writing as a five-year diary—not a journal. As I flip through pages, I see that five months after I was born there are blank days in mid-December. I turn back page by page to a week before Christmas where I find her consecutive short, tight daily entries: Took Harry hosp. Harry in Hosp. Harry passed away. 1:15 p.m. Harry was my great-granddad. Those days around his death look hollow and pain-filled in their blankness. Out of the ordinary rhythm. Then on Christmas Day, Grandma picked up the pen and continued to mark her life down in cadence with her earlier entries.
I write this on the table-for-two on the porch. On top of a piece of sunflower yellow fabric is a small white linen table cloth—whose origins I’m unsure of—and one of Grandma Mills’ hand-embroidered table runners. Baskets of flowers are outlined on either end. At first glance it looks like a completed pattern, but the basket in the middle of my table is lacking green leaves. The flowers float. I look closer and see the remainders of tiny green threads; Grandma had finished it, but the leaves came unraveled and unsewn over the years.
One of Grandma Whittier’s old tablecloths, full of brightness of blue, yellow, and red flowers, is summerly draped over the coffee table. It’s square and met for a table-for-two. I can’t imagine where it would’ve been used in Grandma’s house—but for one of the card tables set up for the kids, perhaps for a Mother’s Day dinner.
Another cross-stitched cloth covers a small side table. It’s overall simple, white appearance betrays the painstaking individual stitches quietly dotting the material in yet another basket-of-flowers design. It sits shyly in contrast with the brightness of cloth on the coffee table.
I’m not in the place I had intended to go while re-reading Grandma Whittier’s diary and writing this piece. And I can’t twist the narrative to get back to my original intent, whatever that was. What I see as I sit on my porch and relook at those blank entries in my great-grandma’s diary is that picking up a pen simply isn’t doable at times. No matter the genre. Still, I hear words that surely were thought, if not spoken, by my grandmothers: This too shall pass.
A collection of Linda’s essays about people and places are woven together in her recently published book, Cornfields to Codfish. Signed copies are available when purchased directly from the author.