Today is Grammaw’s viewing. I have to meet Mother out at the hotel by 3pm. I am ready as far as material things go… the kids and I have new hair cuts, Sarah has new shiny black shoes, I have ironed Timothy’s pants and shirt and packed aprewrinkled black gauze skirt and blouse for myself. Tomorrow is the second viewing, the service (officiated by my cousin-in-law), the actual burial and the reception. I hope to skip the reception and come home.
Grammaw’s life was not one that one would really mourn the ending of. She lead a life of strife and poverty, violence and drink. She was mean, nasty and rude most of the time, seeing all things in black or white with no grey area. Grammaw was also fiercely independent, outspoken in what she believed in and incredibly self sufficient. I am having a hard time coming to terms with how I feel about this all.
I was her favorite, or so she claimed. That’s no small feat, considering she has 6 children and 22 grandchildren, and more great grandchildren than I can count. I was the only one she would babysit… and my younger brother, who had to come along also, we were a package babysitting deal. Even as a young child it was obvious to me that I was the one she favored out of my small immediate family. Fair and blonde, petite with big brown eyes (all of which I have grown into or out of except the “fair” part), a precocious early reader with a knack for pleases and thank yous, I was the one who looked most like her family. She delighted in showing my “smarts” off every chance she got. My unfortunate brother, who was really a much cuter child, was dark haired with the olive skin of my father, quieter and more prone to crying fits… and the disdain of Grammaw who would yell “Quit yer ever lovin’ bawlin’ right now before I whip you!”. How could I not mourn the one woman in my childhood who actually preferred me over my brilliant brother? The brother who looks as much like my father as I do my mother?
Grammaw was also the woman who made fun of me for “being too good to eat squirrel” (I was a vegetarian for years), for going to college, for being “too stuck up”. Once when we went to visit in the fall, she asked me to go get a jar of jelly in the storage room. I was horrified to find a gutted deer hanging upside down from the rafters awaiting butchering in the middle of the room illuminated by the single bare bulb, while shelves lined with countless jugs of elderberry wine sealed with wax, home canned tomatoes and jellies glowed like jewels in a shrine along the walls. She made a wicked moonshine in her still out back which, along with the elderberry wine, produced all the liquor she needed to get drunk and mean.
Grammaw was a big woman, and very strong. Her family’s roots run deep into the Pennsylvania soil. She was raised on an Appalachian farm, not far from where I will be going later today. While Mother was young, they moved quite often, living in one run down house, housing project or apartment after another, but they always ended up back in the mountains. I think Grammaw was right, the coal gets in your blood and pulls you back. You can never leave.
2 Comments
August 19, 2007 at 10:40 pm
I hope it went well for you.
August 21, 2007 at 7:11 pm
All these years I’ve been searching for the “black hole” theory about the coal region, and you said it right there. It’s the coal that gets in your blood and pulls you back!