botanizing

Thelma and Leo

When Thelma heard that I was interested in our family’s stories and photographs, she told my mother to have me come talk to her.  She had many old photographs she told my mother.  Although I had never been eager to enter Thelma’s houses, she was the only remaining connection to the generation of my paternal grandparents, which made me especially interested to hear her stories and to see what photographs she might have.

When I was a child, Thelma and her husband, Leo, who was the brother of my paternal grandmother, lived on a ramshackle farm between my hometown and Bonaparte.  Thelma acted as shepherd for my father’s family, gathering his siblings and their children, at the farm for holidays and other events.  The lane to the house, which sat perhaps half a mile from the highway, went down slope to cross a creek on a wooden bridge and then climbed again to a muddy parking space that faced a chicken house positioned between barn and porch door to the house.  When you stepped from car to mud, you heard a chain run, links clanking across a narrow sidewalk, as it was pulled fast taut by Leo’s dog.  The dog strained against the chain and barked and snapped.  The chain’s reach caught the dog short of your ankles if you approached the porch door by walking across the mud of the parking space.  The narrow sidewalk from porch door to the well pump was the dog’s domain.  

The smells of dog and fear mixed at the entry to the porch with the odor of sour milk.  A metal milk can stood inside the door.  From the porch, you stepped-up through another door into Thelma’s kitchen, where the smells of doghouse, pig lot, and chicken scratch persisted but competed with fried chicken, baking bread, and cooling pies when the family came to Thelma and Leo’s farm.

“Oh my!  Come in, come in!” Thelma said when you opened the door to her kitchen.  “Don!  Put that bag over here,” she said to my father, who carried a paper sack that held our plates and Tupperware bowls of food for the family gathering.  Thelma’s loud voice—her words quick, yet distinct—rises in my memory like the sound her chickens.  “Cluck! Cluck cluck cluck cluck.”  She rocked back her head then threw forward her face to speak.  “Cluck! Cluck cluck cluck cluck.” 

A faded, pale photograph from a family gathering in the late 1940s, more than a decade before I was born, shows Thelma’s high spirit.   Her face, turned from the photographer, was nearly in profile.  She was speaking and smiling.  At family gatherings, Thelma watched the running children, clusters of men, and milling wives; and she added to every conversation she could hear.

When we visited Thelma and Leo’s farm, men were ushered from the kitchen to the living room, which smelled of must, dust, and tobacco spit.  Leo chewed tobacco and spat into a ten-pound coffee can that sat beside his chair.  The living room was jammed arm-to-arm with furniture that was covered loosely by slipcovers.  Crocheted antimacassars clung to the chair backs.  A woodstove kept the living room hot, kept the fragrance of farm and tobacco spit wafting through the room on rising waves of heat.

Leo sat in a chair by the window.  He sat with knees wide and his arms rested on the chair’s arms.  He spoke from the side of his mouth, keeping his teeth clenched and a tobacco wad under his lip.  His low, monotone utterances were thick, like gristle.  I couldn’t understand him, but he wasn’t speaking to me.  “Yeah, I know,” my father would reply to Leo, who leaned over the chair arm to spit into the coffee can.  As he straightened, Leo offered another twist of words in a tobacco juice mumble.  “Yeah,” my father replied and huffed a slight laugh.  I realize now that Leo was humorous, although I never heard the humor.  His teeth-clenched quips were often followed by chuckles among my uncles at family gatherings.

Leo was a lovely and late baby.  His mother Mary gave birth first to two boys, John in 1873 and William in 1875, and then two girls, Minnie in 1881 and Lottie in 1885.  Leo was born in 1896.  At two years old, he sat on the lap of my grandmother Minnie for a photograph.  Dressed in a blouse that had a high, ruffled neck, the nearly 17-year-old Minnie stared wide-eyed at the photographer.  Minnie—ready to calm the child’s motions—rested her hand on her lap beside the toddler’s shoes, but Leo was still, his head steady, his parted hair swept in forelocks across his forehead.  Leo’s eyes were locked beside the photographer, looking toward another who was more important.  Leo’s very sensuous lips were pursed.

When I was a child, Thelma and Leo were old in their 60s.  Thelma was big, and her heavy bosom sagged in the front of her buttoned-up dresses.  Leo was small and seemed swallowed in the bib overalls that he always wore.   I wish now that I had cared enough to learn how Leo met and courted Thelma Daniel.  They married on the third of December 1922 and had a daughter Helen soon after.  The young family sat for a formal portrait—Thelma and Leo side-by-side touched knees.  Leo held the baby Helen with both hands at her waist.  The young baby’s head hung slightly to the side, toward her mother, whose voice I am sure was stilled only for the photograph. 

For this photograph in the 1920s, Thelma and Leo dressed in a manner that I had never known them.  Leo wore a dark suit and a thin tie, and Thelma had a satiny dress with a round, lacy collar set well below her sturdy neck.  The bright collar seemed to glow from the confident light of Thelma’s oval face.  Leo was then a handsome man.  He held his sensuous lips together, not quite in a smile, not quite in a grimace.  Leo was not as comfortable here as Thelma, who may not have known discomfort—at least not until her daughter Helen married a near-do-well drinker, and Helen’s health decayed in early middle age, leading to her early death.  In the 1920s photograph of the young family, Thelma looked directly at the photographer—her gaze was assured and I wonder how she acquired her assurance—while Leo looked off to the side of the photographer, as if distracted by all but the child in his hands. 

Thelma and Leo gave up the farm in old age to settle in a big, worn house at the edge of town.  Their new place, situated at the base of Cemetery Hill and across the street from the Nazarene preacher, had a back lot for Thelma’s hens.  I had been in this house few times, although this is where my father lived for several months, perhaps even a year, after my parents divorced.  I had not visited Thelma’s house when my father lived there, and I could not imagine my father there; my father was easily angered by household mess, especially the kinds I could create as a child and later as a teenager, and Thelma’s houses held scatterings of garbage.

It was more than a decade after Leo’s death and after my father had lived in her house, that I went to visit Thelma to hear stories and see her photographs. I was apprehensive about visiting her.  At family gatherings when I was child, my mother would caution me about Thelma’s food.  “There is dog hair in it,” my mother said.  Before we ate, my mother would put her hand on my shoulder to pull me close, and she said quietly as she nodded subtly toward the spread of food on the table,  “That’s Thelma’s if you don’t want to eat it.”  I worried that Thelma would give me food when I visited. 

When I knocked on her door, I told her who I was.  “Come in,” she said—her voice still as high and sharp as I remembered it.  We sat in a tight sitting room at the front of the house that held it seemed the same furniture and antimacassars that I remembered from 30 years earlier on the farm.

“Are you Don’s boy?” Thelma asked me.  I realized not only that I was distant to her but also, as she talked, that her memory was thin.  I asked her about my grandmother and whether she recalled stories that Leo had told her of times when he and my grandmother were children.  Thelma didn’t recall.  She thought she remembered cousins of mine—she wondered whether they were my cousins—but mostly she knew that Frieda had come that week to take her to the doctor.  She had photographs, she said, but was unsure where they were.  Thelma lifted a stack of papers here and there within arm’s reach as if thinking she might have recently misplaced the pictures.  “I’ve got ‘em,” Thelma said.

She found the photographs in the days after my visit.   Thelma called my mother to let her know that I could have the photographs, and my sister went to pick them up.  That was in the 1990s not long before Thelma died.

Icicle

The cold was sharp in the winter of 1964-65 when I was six years old.  The snow was over a foot deep on a day in January when I walked downtown for a haircut. 

By this time, I had been walking to town by myself for at least two years.  I would go for milk or thread or some other item for my mother.  I walked to town for a haircut each month. Harley Graham had a barbershop on Main Street, which ran perpendicular to the river.  Harley’s shop had striped barber poles on each side of the front window.  The window was frosty in the cold winter.

Harley was an old man, at least 50, when I was a child.  His own thin hair, combed across his head, was held in place by a green visor that he wore at work.  He clipped, scissors in one hand and comb in the other, as he talked to men who sat in the line of chairs opposite the barber chair and the wall-length mirror behind it.  The men were not always waiting for haircuts, they came to the barbershop for a few minutes of conversation.  They would step in from the cold and shiver as they sat in one of the chairs.  Harley would greet each one of them, and they would talk for a few minutes.  In this winter they talked about the cold.  They didn’t talk to me, although if Harley and I were alone, he would hum a stream of sentences directed less at me than at his own thoughts.  Harley was a talker.

Downtown was not far from our house.  I crossed the railroad tracks and walked down the low hill to the end of our block, turned left at the Latter Day Saint’s church to walk another block, where I turned right at the corner of highway 2, where the Schakels had a large house.  Only two more blocks from there, I would cross the highway to the center of town, where the barbershop was located next to the Gamble Store in the middle of Main.  The walk took ten minutes each way and the haircut no more than 20 minutes, unless I had to wait for someone else to be finished.

This day, I was gone for well over an hour.

As I had walked down the block from the Schakels’ house, I saw huge stalactite-like icicles hanging from the lip of the roof of Rueben Mohr’s front porch.  Some of these icicles were nearly five feet long and thick as a man’s leg.  I was awed by them.  I wanted one of those icicles.  I studied the icicles on my way to my haircut and, while Harley clipped my hair, I thought about ways to collect one.

I have always been a collector, especially from nature but also of books, drawings, photographs, and most anything else that has an appealing shape or texture.  Never before this day had I tried to collect an icicle.  I had often popped icicles from overhangs, but those had been for the purpose of crunching with my teeth to feel the ice on my lips and cold melt water run over teeth.  The icicles on Rueben Mohr’s house were not to crunch, they were to have.

I was determined to have one of these icicles. They were huge.  I tried jumping up to them but couldn’t come close to their tips.  Next I tried climbing up to them.  The Mohr’s porch had half a wall.  I thought I could climb onto the wall to the icicles, but the overhang of the roof extended far enough out from the wall that I couldn’t reach them.  I resorted to snowballs.  I threw snowball after snowball.  The few that hit the icicles had no effect.  Most crashed softly against the front of the Mohr’s house.

I don’t know how long Rueben Mohr had been watching me.  He came out of his house, and we talked about the icicles.  He said he should have knocked them off.  They were dangerous.  “Wait a minute,” he said and went back into his house.  He came out with a broom.  When he poked at the icicles they didn’t budge.  Finally, he used the broom like a baseball bat and whacked one icicle.  It cracked from the roof and broke into pieces when it hit the ground.  That one wouldn’t serve my purposes.  When he whacked the next one, it came as smoothly from the roof as a baby tooth comes from a child’s mouth.  The icicle landed sideways in snow.  It was nearly whole and nearly as tall as me.  I thanked Rueben, and hugged the icicle to my body as I walked away.

Carrying the icicle was clumsy and cold.  I went slowly.  The icicle melted against me.  I stumbled once and dropped it, breaking several inches from its tip. I tried to drag it.  It kept slipping from my cold hands.  It took forever to go the two blocks to our street.  I carried the icicle across my chest, going as fast as I could.  I had to stop to rest.  Finally, I made it home.

“Where have you been?” my mother said.  “I’ve been worried about you.”

I told her the story of the icicle.  “What are you going to do with it?” she asked.

Photograph Albums

“Do you want to work on the photographs?” my mother would say when I visited.  In the last decade of her life, we sorted through the loose photographs of our extended family and arranged them in albums.  There were photographs that my mother had accumulated over many years as well as those that came from her sister Hazel and a few from her mother.  The more recent photographs were often still in the packages received from the printer.  We began by sorting the photographs into the various families of my aunts and uncles, and those of older generations were simply gathered in my mother and father’s lineages.  Each lineage went into its own envelope for storage in a large cardboard box.

We worked over the years at the kitchen table in mother’s house and later at a smaller table in the apartment she had in a senior citizens’ complex. We would spread the photographs of a family over the table, then begin to arrange them chronologically, gauging the age of individuals by changes in their faces and by the appearance of children and grandchildren. I would ask mother who was in a photograph and what year it might have been taken.  She would say something like, “well that was taken in Moulton”—or some other small town in southern Iowa or northern Missouri—“and it must be . . .”  I would check her identifications and guesses at dates against other photographs, then write the year and names of people on the page of the album and mother would put adhesive ‘art corners’ on the photograph, lick the corners, and adhere the photograph to the album page.

My mother was not a storyteller but seeing faces of family from decades past provoked her thoughts of relationship and sometimes a vignette.  She would pick-up photographs here and there and laugh.  “What?” I would say, and she would recall an event or something she had been told. Later at night, after we had finished and replaced the envelopes of families in the cardboard box, I would try to recall what she had told me.  I would write a few notes from her memories.

My mother enjoyed looking through the photograph albums.  When she thought about a relative, she would pull the albums from the closet where they were stored to find a photograph of the person.  I think of her rubbing the fingers of her left hand over those photographs and, nearer the end of her life, when her vision had weakened badly, she used a rectangular magnifier that had a handle like a hairbrush to search for the memories she sought in the pictures.

She wanted the photograph albums one morning.  Relatives from Ohio were coming later to visit, and she wanted to show them a photograph.  My sister, J___, had stopped-by mother’s apartment, which she often did in the mornings and mother, who could then not quite reach the stack of photograph albums from her wheelchair, asked J___ for help.  Mother wheeled her chair around to the closet where the albums were stored. My sister took one and then another album from the shelf for mother to check.  They weren’t finding the photograph she wanted.  Mother leaned forward, reaching toward the album she thought was right, but sat back heavily in her wheelchair.  “Dizzy,” she said, “I’m going to faint.”  Mother’s head lolled, and my sister reached to hold it.  With her other hand, J___ reached for mother’s wrist, where she felt her pulse, which was still alive. J___ reached then for the telephone to push the button that mother had marked for emergencies.

That image of my mother and sister lies like a photograph in my memory, although I was in London.  It was evening in London, and I was planning to go to a party and had a ticket to leave for Paris the next morning.  Still, the memory of my mother’s chin sinking against my sister’s hand lies photographically—sharply shadowed by a point-and-shoot flash—on a page of sorts in which it is juxtaposed against Paris.  I wonder what will happen to this memory over time and whether the juxtaposition of my mother’s fallen head and Paris will get mixed around in some absurd way.  Of course, I have neither a memory nor a photograph of that day in my mother’s apartment—I have the story.  I wrote it after my sister and I talked on the phone, and, when I was back in my mother’s apartment a few days later, it was again the first thing that J___ told me.

The photographs of albums are episodic, much like stories; but the photograph albums are incomplete narratives. I look for their dramatic arc, but it’s unclear.  There is more randomness to a photograph album than there is in stories, and albums are more fragmentary. Like memories, I think. Our memories are drawn, kin-like, to these aspects of photograph albums.  I wonder about the relationship between memory and photographs, especially whether our memories bond to photographs, whether time turns photographs to memories in some alchemy story and age.

I have been looking at the photograph albums that my mother and I made, and, without new photographs, I have been sorting through memories. It’s hop scotch.  My memories bound one leg, then two, across the photographs, landing often between the pictures.  Those interstices intrigue me.  I am tempted to write between the pictures—with a fine-pointed roller ball, I want to bridge the fragments, making stories, false photographs made of words.

This is a false photograph, but a real memory:  it’s April 2000, and I have returned to Iowa to visit my mother, who has just been diagnosed with an untreatable cancer.  She will live nine months, perhaps a year, according to her physician.  At the end of my visit, we are in the Cedar Rapids airport.  We say our goodbyes.  My brother-in-law pushes my mother’s wheelchair into the elevator.  They turn to face me.  My mother gives me half a wave with her curled palm.  “I love you,” she says.  I am a forty-something man with graying hair, and I am crying.  “She’ll be here when you get back,” my sister says. In the bright light of the elevator, my sister and her husband stand beside my mother in her wheelchair.  My mother’s shoulders slump slightly.  The elevator’s doors slide shut.  Like a camera’s shutter.

In the last photograph album, which my mother assembled while I was away, she included photographs of herself.  They were taken with an inexpensive Polaroid camera that produced only fuzzy images in cool colors.  She sits in the photographs at the table in her apartment, where she has spread the afghans that she has recently crocheted.  She had spent much of her last two decades crocheting afghans, at which she had great skill, making them tight and thick and winning regularly prizes for them at local crafts shows.  She asked to be buried with her crochet needles.  She asked also to have her arms covered by a small afghan that she had made.  “I don’t want to be cold,” mother said, “I want something on my arms.”

Remembrances

My sister has sent me a copy of WS’s Remembrances, a photocopied volume in a plastic binding.  There are a few photographs but mostly the volume consists of transcriptions of W’s memories.  WS, my only living uncle, is my mother’s brother.  The stories in Remembrances were compiled by W’s daughter J from taped conversations that she had with him around the time of his eightieth birthday.  Collecting the stories of our elderly parents is something that many of us wish we had done, and, perhaps, we should have considered collecting those stories before our parents were elderly and their memories had faded or begun to merge into confusing strands, more twisted bits of frayed string than actual stories.

As I opened W’s Remembrances, I felt wistful about my mother’s unrecorded stories and also a little jealous.  The jealousy was the sense that someone else was telling stories that I might have wanted to tell.  That sounds odd, I know, and there were no stories in W’s old man’s memories that I would have wanted to tell.  The jealousy passed quickly, the wistfulness did not.

I have no memories of WS from my childhood.  I know only that I met him six years ago at my mother’s funeral.  He was a tall, bent old man, who came in with a couple of women, and sat in the family section.  I had no idea who he was—my sister, turning red with fury, said, “That’s W.  I want him to leave.”  I walked over to him, shook his hand, and introduced myself. 

I knew little about the source of my sister’s anger at W’s appearance.  W had been unwilling to communicate with my mother for decades.  After receiving Remembrances, I called my sister, who is much older than I am and continued to live close to our mother, to ask what she knew about the disruption between W and our mother.

“W and K [another of the siblings] were farming with grandpa and grandma,” my sister said. “Grandpa and grandma wanted to reinvest the earnings back in the farm.  W and K didn’t—they wanted to spend the money.”  W and K would then have been young men in their twenties or early thirties.  Investing in a farm with their retirement age parents must not have been what they wanted.  “Mom and dad got involved in the disagreement,” my sister said.  “They sided with grandpa and grandma.” Then with telling hesitations, she said, “Dad . . . even though he never said much . . . you know the things he could say when . . . I think he got into it with W.”  This must have been in the late 1940s or early 1950s.

It was only at family funerals that my mother encountered W. At their sister R’s funeral in 1985, my mother said, “I’m going to try to make it up with him.”   She walked slowly and unevenly to him.  “W,” mother said, “I have a photograph I bet you’d really like see.”  W turned away, stepped away without speaking to her.

When their sister A died in 1998, my mother paid her respects the day before the funeral.  She told A’s children that she wouldn’t go to the funeral.  It was very difficult for her to get around, she said, but she remained deeply hurt by W and didn’t want to see him.

As a death-seeing vulture is how my sister must have seen W when he came-in to our mother’s funeral.  It was an arrogant reunion of the sort the living can have with the dead, and W, by virtue of late birth and, surely, some luck was the last survivor among his siblings.  I opened W’s Remembrances with anxiety because the last survivor could have chosen to damn the others.  He could have told a story of his satisfaction at going to their funerals, attending to deaths with the same power that he had ignored lives.

Ignoring lives has its own power.  In his Remembrances, W hardly mentions his parents or siblings. Only his elder brothers, F and B, 15 and 10, respectively, at W’s birth, have made an impression on him. As working-men doing road construction when W was forming his first childhood memories, they must have been out-sized as brothers.  His eldest sisters go unnoticed, although he remarks generally about country families that “some girls were housekeepers in homes for room and board.”  Indeed, two of W’s elder sisters had that experience of moving while young away from home, where the new offspring kept coming in the 1920s—P in 1921, A in 1923, W in 1925, and, finally, K in 1927—and into the homes of others to clean and care for children, but that experience as something intimate to his own family may have made no impression on W’s memory.

In what W has remembered, two things especially struck me.  The first was that most of the stories were everyday occurrences, recalled with shimmery imprecision but with knick-knack details.  The second was the contrast with my mother’s memories.  My mother looked at things in her own home, and she looked outward only through the kitchen window.  Her outlook was, perhaps, willfully, fearfully narrow, shaped by a childhood on farms and in small, rural towns, by educational limitations, and especially by coming-of-age as the Depression hit.  Her short outlook reflected also, I think, a disability she suffered as a toddler that severely limited her mobility for the rest of her life.  On the other hand, W looked and went outward; he writes in Remembrances about his travels to Central and South America, Asia, and Europe.  I wonder as I look at his Remembrances not only about relationships between gender and outlook, and how those relationships could be shaped by culture and the economy of home, but also about the relationship between estrangement and looking outward.  Many forces impel our outlooks.

In the family genealogy on the final page of W’s Remembrances, the year of the birth and death of each of his siblings is listed, except for my mother.  He gives a wrong year for her birth, and the year of her death is not listed.  It is as if she, among all the rest of his siblings, although not remembered, has not yet died in his mind.  At R’s funeral, the photograph that mother wanted to give to W was an image of him as a small child tending pigs.  “W,” my mother had said to me, “loved to tend the pigs.  They were his pigs.”  All memories must be pigs, the way they root around in us.