My Grandmother’s Way

“We always put manure on our garden and we never had any bugs, but now they’ve got all those fancy fertilizers. You just watch they’ll be coming back to our ways.” Her voice had a ring of independence. She knew what she was talking about. She was a farmer and a hard worker. I would come upon her in the garden — her short sturdy figure bent over vegetables or stooped picking strawberries in the  hot morning sun. She wore a cotton-checked dress and a big straw hat that covered her freckled face and milky white shoulders. Only her hands, stained by the earth, were weathered.

” I always put a potato in my bread dough – just cook it, mash it, and put it in with everything else. It does something nice to the texture of the bread. ” Her flour-coated hands glided through the air as she taught me how to knead and pound the bread. Her kitchen was more modern when I knew her, but she still talked proudly of the cast iron stove she once had.  Listening to her as a teenager, I  would think of the many times we had tasted the sweetness of freshly picked strawberries piled upon home-made shortbread and smothered with cream.

We would sit and talk about me and the new generation.  She chuckled at my faded jean overalls and told me of a time when her children hated to wear them.  My Grandpap had always worn them and several pairs were still hanging in the small room off the kitchen, even 10 years after his death. I could tell that she was skeptical of my generation.  She loved her morning paper. She would start off with the local news — zeroing in first on any murders or robberies. But she would eventually  work her way through the pages to the section I knew was most important to her: the obituaries. “When you get my age you’ve got to read the obituaries, she said, “because a lot of your friends are dying.”

She asked me if I wanted any ice cream. She always loved ice cream.  She used to make her own, but now she bought it from the store.  She scooped out  a dish for each of us in her blue delftware bowls. It was 3:00 pm and time for her favorite soap opera “General Hospital.” Did I want to watch it?  I smiled and said I would rather take a walk around the pond where we used to swim. I remembered how she would sit on the bank of the pond with her straw hat and watch us swim and play. Her name was Rhudell and she had her ways and she followed them.