Again, I lay thinking of yet another time and place, 71 years ago.
I have felt sorry for myself these past days. My back is broke. I feel a lot of pain and I feel resentful that I could not care for my home or my husband or my family.
Jon and his boys are here and this is where they should be, but our small house seems at times over filled, yet it really is not, not when I think back to 1927. I was six, my small brother, Mark, not even a year and half and even at that young age knew that Mama carried yet another baby in her body. We children of that time were not unknowing. We lived with animals and the spring brought forth lambs and calves. We watched the baby chicks hatch in the big black dripper pans that were stacked around the big black coal stove.
I'm thinking tonight of how hard it must have been for my mother and grandmother, yet, without hesitation, Marcus and Amanda had come to Salt Lake, gather up LaVerna and her children and had taken them home to a house, a much smaller house than mine. They cared for us with love and sometimes scolding, but I remember mostly love.
My mother was only 24, yet she was already a widow with two small children and a third one on the way while another one lay in a small grave in the North Ogden Cemetery. How she must have worried about tomorrow and all the tomorrows to come.
As I look at the picture of Marcus and Amanda on my bedroom wall, I remember that they were only in the forties. If, in my memory, they seemed old, it is only because age came earlier 70 years ago.
How crowded we had to have been in that tiny house at 605 South State. Yet, in spite of the fact that I sometimes cried for the daddy that had often carried me on his shoulders, I more often found a happy world with cousins, Aunts and even a Great Grandmother up the street.
How hard it must have been for those wonderful people, our Grandparents. Grandpa made us rooms on what had been a lean-to back porch. Houses for our income group came with one bedroom. By the door of the kitchen stood a wash stand with a big pitcher of water and a bowl to wash in. A rod across the back held a towel and crotchet wash cloths. Above was a mirror, quite flawed. On my living room wall are two colorful ceramic parrot vases. They held toothbrushes then, but today I count them among my treasures.
A big kitchen table sat in the center of the kitchen, covered with oilcloth. It was used for so many things, to make the daily bread, which was made at least every other day. It was to peel the apples on that were to be used to make apple butter for that bread. On its cleaned off surface, my dresses and the boys' shirts, my bloomers and Grandma's big aprons were cut out and pinned together, from the rolls of cloth that came from the Golden Rule Store. Often my dresses and the boy's shirts, my bloomers and Grandmas aprons all came from the same cloth because it was cheaper to buy cloth by the "bolt". In the corner of the kitchen, a big black Monarch range kept us warm in the winter and "hot" in the summer. The coffeepot was always there. Usually there was a pot of soup or chicken. Sometimes there were doughnuts or crullers, frying in hot lard in a big black old pot that had come across the plains to Idaho and which had once hung over open campfires. It still did, on occasion. When it was unbearably hot, Grandma cooked over a fire set on a brick box in the back of the house. The pot sits on my floor by the fireplace today.
Then the table would be cleaned and the dishes put on for yet another meal. The kitchen seemed big to the child that I was, but it was not. When we were all at the table, the dishes were bumping against each other and we had to be careful not to touch the hot stove. Hot water came from a reservoir that was attached to the side of the stove. Dishes were gathered on to a dishpan, washed, rinsed, and then drained in a large black dripper. Grandma had many of these pans) they were used for everything, baby chicks, and bread, to hold jars in the oven as we canned the garden things of summer. It seemed there were always pans of mason jars there when Grandma wasn't baking. How I long today for one of her golden sponge cakes.
She was strict though; the parlor doors were mostly closed to our invasions except for holidays and sometimes Sunday dinner. Saturday I had a wonderful chore there, I could sit by the library table to dust the books stored there and could take my time.
Sometimes the patience ran thin and they called each other (the grown-ups did) names. The washing was done in two tubs and scrub board, with the clothes being hung out on the outside lines summer and winter. Those same tubs were used for our Saturday baths. However on those days, the big stove always yielded good pot roast or soup and crusty bread, and steamed and wet linoleum floors. (In the summer the whole process was moved to the wash benches outside the door and the small cook stove that stood under the open porch roof by the grain storage house.)
Now I wonder how Grandma and Mama stood up to things that summer. Mama's pregnancy was a bad one, even to my young eyes, and Grandma plodded around constantly on swollen feet and legs. (she cut holes even in her Sunday shoes to accommodate her swollen toes.)
She went always, it seemed, going when I arose in the morning and sitting in the kitchen sewing long after I went to bed. She fed the chickens, gathered the eggs, milked the cows and then fed us our breakfast - oatmeal. Grandpa had long ago left the house for his job on the railroad as track inspector and repairer, but he kept his yard immaculate, planted gardens after he came home and still found time for us children.
It was a happy, sad summer. Now I understand the terrible stress that was there with the grown-ups packed together in a little space, the tightness of money, and the need to make every penny count and always preparing food or washing or mending clothes. Remember, there was no TV or even radio.
What I liked best was when Grandpa made a fire in the coal stove in the dining room, lit the lamps and played the big tall gramophone. He had crafted a jumping jack clown from painted wooden sticks and, after the machine was wound up, the doll would clack, clack and fall.
Somehow the summer and fall passed. The gardens were harvested. The dead leaves were burned, along with a lot of animosity. Mom was really sick by then and spent most of her days on the old horse hair couch. On Halloween, we carved the home grown pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns. Grandma made her good peanut brittle and the home made cider was ready to be tasted.
A few days later Mom gave birth, as the Bible says, "and so it was that the days were accomplished that she should be delivered and she brought forth her son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes".
William Arvel Brown, 1935
There weren't many rooms in our "inn" either, but William Arvel Brown found a host of welcoming arms and hearts on that November 6th, 1927. We older children were bedded down in quilts on the parlor floor but I was allowed to come to the bed where Mama was surrounded by Aunt Lindy, Grandma and Mrs. Evans from across the street. I got to hold him.
The years have passed and, as I think back, I feel somewhat ashamed of my griping. That was a hard year on everyone with the crowding, the grief and the lack of money. I also believe it was love that was there and that has survived since. I remember Grandma Amanda, as she knelt on the floor to tuck me back in bed and Grandpa Marcus gleefully carrying around the small bundle he already called "Tubby". Oh, our crowded fighting days were not done, but we all survived. Grandma had a temper to go with her red hair, but she also knew about loving and sharing.
Another year found us in our own little house, the key word is "little", but we found space to be together. In today's world, there's not a lot of that kind of caring around. Big houses can also be crowded.
1985 Laverna Maude Jones
