It took a few years to realize how fortunate I’d been to be a bored, only child hearing Mom tell stories over and over about her life before becoming my mother. I learned to understand her because I knew about her past.
Edith, the youngest of four children, was only seven years old when her mother died at home followed by the funeral held there. Elder sisters, Frances and Laura, soon married and moved to their own houses. Her dad raised her and her brother, Laurence, who was two years older and had epilepsy. Their farm could be a dangerous place for him because at that time there was no medication to control his seizures.
In the nineteen twenties and thirties, country people lived a primitive lifestyle. Her dad carried water by the pail full from the hand pump in the yard into the house. During cold weather, stoves in their home burned wood to provide heat. The fires went out overnight.
After eight years of walking to a nearby country school, she rode her horse five miles to town to attend Durand High School. To wash her face on winter mornings, she broke the ice in the pail, poured water into a pan and heated it on the stove. After dressing and bundling up, she went out to the barn to saddle Molly. Halfway to town she stopped at her sister Fran’s house to warm up and eat breakfast. When she arrived in Durand, she left her horse at the livery stable uptown and walked to the high school on the southwest edge of the village. Her senior year, she drove the new ’29 Dodge her dad had bought, unless the dirt roads were too muddy.
Edith met Alex, my father, when the car had a flat tire along the road and he came by riding his horse. She could have changed it herself, but I’m sure she enjoyed standing back and watching this cute, young guy who was new to the neighborhood do the work.
In the month of December when she was 21, her father went to the hospital for surgery. He died there right before Christmas. The following February, Edith and Alex were married and started farming. I was born 2 1/2 years later. Mom never let it show that the holidays continued to evoke sad memories for her.
Although Mom said, “I didn’t have anyone to teach me to be a mother or a grandmother,” she was the ideal mother for me and grandmother to our children.
Are you telling the younger generation your stories?