My grandmother could dress any animal or fowl; racoon, chicken, pheasant, you name it.
Grandpa’s customers supplied her kitchen, too. His lifelong occupation was a 50-yard walk from Grandma’s kitchen to his gas station on busy Minnesota Highway 60. Throughout the 1930s and ‘40s, folks pulled up to Grandpa’s pumps in need of gas, but with no money. “Well, what have you got?” he’d ask. One day the reply to that question was “a possum.” Grandpa filled the man’s gas tank, took the possum, walked to the kitchen door and handed Grandma the possum. She told me later that a possum is tough to skin. This wasn’t a complaint, just a point of comparison. With every animal she dressed she’d marvel at “the way it was put together,” how it differed from another animal.
I couldn’t enjoy any animal once I had seen how it was put together; she enjoyed it even more.
Maybe it was her training as a nurse in Rochester, Minnesota, at what became the Mayo Clinic. She graduated September 29, 1929, during the depression. Two of her teachers, William and Charlie Mayo, signed her graduation certificate. She had completed a four-year course that half of her classmates found too difficult to finish. On her first day of nurses training an instructor told her that at 90 pounds she would have to “put some weight on.”
She told me she ate crackers with butter and honey all that fall. By Christmas she had added twenty pounds. But most of her life she was 105 pounds of quiet, intellectual curiosity. Her drive was to understand what could be understood. What was futile to understand, like why people behaved the way they did or whom her six children chose to marry, she didn’t waste a moment on.
I once met her younger sister Rachel, and she told me about a quality my grandmother revealed in their childhood near Sentinel Butte, North Dakota. A pack of coyote blocked their route to school one morning. Grandma held Rachel with one hand; with the other she aimed her shiny metal lunch pail directly at the sun. She aimed the reflected light back into the pack, and it spooked and dispersed them. Seventy years later, Rachel was still awestruck by my grandmother’s calm ingenuity.
In her early eighties, Grandma moved her heavy cast iron skillets to the highest shelf. I cautioned her about the move; “I need the strength training,” she said. She also began making wine. She brought out a bottle of her raspberry, black currant, rhubarb or dandelion wine on special occasions. See my blessay “Free Weights.”
At the end of every day, she took all the rugs out of the kitchen, shook them and hung them on the clothesline. She swept the floor and washed it with what remained of her morning water. (See my blessay “Ode to a Broom”)
There was beauty in her kitchen – gingham curtains on the windows. She made time to find beauty everywhere or to create it. In the summer she made bouquets from her garden, often Coral Bells and Shasta Daisies. Grandma lived the Chinese proverb: “If you have two loaves of bread, sell one to buy a hyacinth.” She sought to please herself in her choice of flowers and fabrics. Every few years there were new kitchen curtains and a matching blouse made on her Husgvarna sewing machine that hummed late into the night.
There wasn’t much in the material world that interested her, but she did buy two oil paintings from a local artist. One was a view of Split Rock Lighthouse on the shores of Lake Superior, and the other was a still life of asters.
I miss her. I miss the smell of her kitchen. A smell that cannot be replicated. Oh, I guess the ingredients are all available – the yeasty smell of bread rising, the briny smell of a cucumber on its way to picklehood, fresh flowers, coffee boiling – but the original combination that created it all, that’s gone.
I still marvel at the sheer output from her kitchen – over all those years – output that fed and clothed six children, and a husband. Output that I would never have believed one person capable of, had I not seen it myself.
But mostly I miss her quiet, calm self-reliance. The purposeful rhythm of her life. The rhythm of another world, the world she created.
A world I knew I was privileged to witness in Grandma’s kitchen.