Eric Cox, publisher of “The Knightstown Banner,” printed a lovely picture that he took of a full Moon above a soy bean field. As well as watching sunrises and sunsets, I am a Moon watcher. Last week a “super” Moon was the closest to the Earth that it’s been for 70 years. At 7:15 on Monday morning, the westering moon was a bright, huge, golden orb. Oh how fortunate we are to see such beauty all around us for the price of a few minutes’ time!
During a leisurely inventory of Granny’s sewing basket, I took out the stub of a thick black pencil that was similar to those with which we learned to print in first grade. Following cataract surgery when she was a child, Granny learned to read and write. Then after glaucoma caused her to lose her vision and one eye, she used a wire grid similar to a little oven rack that she put over a sheet of paper and wrote between the wires with her thick pencil. There are several letters to my mother. Sometimes she got the lines mixed up so that her writing was illegible.
There’s a hodgepodge of items that produced random memories: pins, a pretty cardboard folder of needles, a needle threader, a thimble, thread and a few assorted buttons. Stubbornly, Granny never gave up. She cooked by feel and pieced a quilt when she could barely see. I felt her presence when I slipped her thimble onto my finger.
Visions of long ago swept over me when I came across her black cigarette holder that was similar to the one that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used. My uncle Ivan, also blind, used a similar holder. I see him still, sitting with Granny, smoking, sharing risqué jokes, and I hear his merry laughter. Sometimes she burned holes in things. More seriously, a physician said that it might relax her and help her sleep if she drank a bottle of beer before going to bed. He forgot that she also took sleeping pills. One night she dozed off and caught her chair on fire. “That fixed me,” she said. “After this, I’ll do my smoking and guzzling at different times!”
The basket triggered thoughts of Grandpa who was a handsome little man whose hair never turned white even when he was in his nineties. He wanted to study art and become an artist. His mother, the family’s matriarch who controlled the money, said, “That is no fit occupation for a man. You will go to Valparaiso College and get a teaching certificate, or else you will stay here on the farm and be a farmer.” End of story! During that era, young people mostly did what their parents dictated.
People used to have autograph books in which their friends wrote. Grandpa’s little book is in the basket, and I thought about his life and the yearnings that he might have had long before I was born. His book has autographs and sayings written by the friends he made at Valparaiso:
“To my friend Kelly: You asked me to write in your album. I hardly know where to begin. There’s nothing original in me — unless it’s original sin.”
Granny’s autograph book is also there and includes this message written by a beau who was in love with her: “The saddest words of voice or pen — the saddest are these — ‘What might have been.’” Granny was a dish when she was young. She boasted, “Each of my breasts would fill a half-gallon tin. Just look at these shriveled, droopy old things now!” She didn’t like her auburn hair which was not fashionable in those days. Dying one’s hair was a major no-no, but she told me, “I decided to hell with convention and intended to dye it black. Instead, it came out purple, and I had to wear a hat everywhere I went for several months.” Yep, that was my granny! wclarke@comcast.net