Old Times

Del and I have started visiting my grandma once a week. It's been really nice and I wish I would have started sooner. She likes to tell me stories of when she was a kid and I love listening to them. This post is dedicated to them-I will try to recollect as many as I can. Like every old person she had the same story about walking 2 miles to school, even in the winter with not very good winter clothes. "So did you run the whole way" I asked-"oh yea, run and walk." Christmases were fun because they would attach the sled to the horses. Her dad would heat up bricks and then put a blanket over them and it would be warm all the way to town but then on the way back really cold. Her mom would always make lefse Christmas Eve. Her dad built them a kids playhouse out of logs that looked like Abraham Lincoln's place-whatever that means. They would go down to the dump (her many brother and sisters) and dig out the old plates and cups and bring them back to their playhouse. Her mom would bring down a big bowl of creamed sweet corn, "oh that was so good" my grandma said as though she was tasting each tiny warm kernel in her mouth. That lead us to talk about vegetables "I don't like peas, I do like them like..." And she trailed off describing all the ways she did like peas which basically boiled down to the fact she liked peas. Her and a few of her siblings would sit by the roadside in the summer and wait for the pea trucks to come by. They would have giant bushes and they would grab peas by the handful. We talked about meat just a little bit, her dad had a smoker and would smoke pigs, then they would hang up in the attic because it was so cold up there and all the kids would take big bites of meat as they walked by, so eventually her dad found a new place for the meat. My grandma grew up in a big house, 9 kids total. All of her siblings dead now except her and one of her sisters. That's the part that breaks my heart. Listening to my grandma talk about how much she misses her family. She was born somewhere in the middle and now practically the last one standing. Out lived even her husband and then her long term boyfriend. For my own selfish reasons I'm glad she is still here. I can't imagine a world without her. I'm grateful for her stories, listening about simpler times and pleasures, imaging the warm buttery lefse she describes it's a shame that lifestyle will die with her. It will just be written about in books and blogs.