In My Garden - Life History of Zelda L. Kline - Part 3

Most people think of Danes as being light complexioned but many are really quite dark. Actually, Grandpa was a "Black Dane". His skin was even more wrinkled and darkened by the years of the sun and the wind and exposure to the elements. He was a section hand for the railroad and spent his days, summer and winter, with his crew pumping his little rail car up and down the tracks, inspecting the tracks for damage and repairing it when found. His eyes were the brightest blue you ever saw and they actually twinkled with a smile that his mustache hid. His shoulders were broad and his arms were strong from years of swinging a pick and sledge and pumping the "hand car". Though I was a husky six, he could pick me up and swing me high.


That first summer in Preston was actually a happy time for me. When Grandpa was home, I never left his side, tagging wherever he went. Potato planting was a game. I watched him and Grandma cut the seed potatoes so that each piece had a seedling eye. Then I followed Grandpa down the row, dropping the pieces in the holes he dug. Then we would go back down the rows, brushing the dirt over and back into piles. Later we would inspect each pile each day to catch the first green shoots. It was very hard to comprehend how those wrinkled brown lumps of seedlings could produce Grandma's mounds of creamy, white mashed potatoes. Late in the fall, when I helped gather the harvest dug from those mounds and piled the smooth round ovals into the storage gunnysacks, I found a great wonder in nature.

Grandpa had a great respect for education. One of the first gifts he gave me was an easel blackboard with a roll top showing the alphabet letters and the numbers. On those summer evenings, he taught me to read by lamplight. He didn't like the bare electric bulbs hanging from the ceilings and preferred the kerosene lamps to read by. He spoke with a heavy accent. However, he read piles of papers and books, both the Danish papers his sisters sent from Denmark and the big city papers that were sometimes left in the trains passing through and which the porters saved for him. He took me by the hand and led me up the steep steps to the door of the Carnegie Library. There we walked quietly between the shelves and shelves of books, always going home with our arms loaded with treasure. By the time school started in the fall and I entered the first grade, I could read.

1928 Markus Jeppesen

Strange, is it not, that a short, immigrant laborer helped plant such a love of reading in me. More than that, he taught me patriotism. He built a flagpole and flew the flag on national and state holidays. He taught me to revere such men as Washington and Lincoln. He made me copy the Gettysburg Address on my blackboard and then made me learn it by heart.

I knew he was an alcoholic and hid his bottles in the granary and under the porch steps, but it never bothered me. He never missed a days work. He kept his yards and garden immaculate. The fences and sheds were always in good repair and if Grandma sometimes had to help him to bed at night, I didn't mind. I now believe that he drank out of frustration because his mind kept reaching out beyond his bodily limits. In later years, when I was grown and Grandma was dead, he remarried. I heard that he had increased his drinking. At his funeral, one of his friends told me that his early death came as a result of that drinking, but it mattered not, for my tears that day were for the Grandpa of my childhood, who had given me so much.

Grandma too, was a part of that summer and the summers that followed. I would awake early to follow her to the barn and watch her milk. We would feed the cats fresh frothy milk and then pour it into shallow pans to cool on the milk shelves in the cellar. We would then feed the chickens. She said that they were dumb, noisy animals. Their eggs were important and they were good eating for a Sunday dinner. There was always a dog and several cats. The big green parrot, Polly, was her first love and her second was her milk cow, Lottie. She told me stories of her girlhood, when she would ride horses like the wind and break the ponies to the saddle. She grew up in an all-girl home and her stepfather taught her to be his farm "boy". Her hair was red and her skin looked like creamy milk.

1928 Amanda Petra Jeppesen

It was hard for me to reconcile my picture of this staid, rather heavy-set woman with that wild, red headed girl, but her sisters, Aunt Alma and Aunt Lindy, assured me it was so. She wore a flannel petticoat, and flat, sensible shoes and cotton hose, but one day, I snooped and found a heavy, Satin robe, trimmed with lots of lace, hidden in the bottom of her drawer. Her hair stayed red to her death.

She played the mouth organ and guitar and could sing all the old songs, but mostly she could cook. Make that-COOK. Her food was legendary. It's no wonder I was a fat little girl, what with soups, loaded with feather-light dumplings, homemade bread and home-churned butter, cakes, jelly rolls and sugar buns. She use to carry chicken soup to anyone who got sick and I use to think that people got sick just so they could have Aunt Amanda's soup and crusty-buttery bread. She used to make something called Red Mush from rhubarb, raspberries and sago. She would cover it with thick, clotted cream. I believed that is what ambrosia must have been.

Grandma taught me to cook. Luckily, there were plenty of eggs and butter and cream, so my failures were not so bad, but I learned, and she never worried about the mess I made. I can still see myself as a pudgy little girl, standing at the table on a chair with a large apron tied around me and elbow deep in dough. I guess I knew a lot about heaven then.

Grandma's flower garden was the envy of the whole town. Her dahlias and roses would have taken prizes anywhere, but instead she shared them with everyone. Even a casual passerby could count on taking home a prize bloom if they stopped to admire her yard. She said, "God meant gardens to be shared with everyone." and grandma was a sharer of ever thing.