So used to serving was she, instead of being served, Grandma seemed always to ask aid under protest; her gratitude was out of all proportion to the service rendered: “You poor child, when will you get paid for all you do for Grandma?” was the burden of her talk, though the “poor child” fairly doted on running errands for her. “Four pounds of white sugar, two of light brown, half a pound of green tea, and a ball of Babbitt’s concentrated lye”—this refrain I would con over and over on my way to the village, lest I forget it while loitering to watch the boats crawl under the canal bridge.
How many hours I have spent down in her cool sweet cellar over the little red churn, the dasher going up and down, up and down, while I said aloud my favourite poems—after Grandma had gone upstairs. Many a pat of butter has gathered under the dasher while I rehearsed the winning of Juliet, Othello’s speech to the senate, Portia’s speech to Shylock—extracts from Cathcart’s Literary Reader, which was my first introduction to real literature.
Men do not gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles. As Grandma’s life had been one of service, so her daughter, my mother, was untiring in devotion to her mother; and so, too, I am glad to say, Mother’s children have tried to emulate the filial examples set them. By way of contrast I am reminded of a story illustrating hereditary tendencies: A boy was arrested for beating his father; the injured father defended his boy thus, “He can’t help beating me: I beat my father; my father beat his father; and my son’s son will beat him—it runs in our family.” I am glad it runs in our family to love and revere our parents. Yet, there was Grandpa with his habit of profanity, the son of a Baptist clergyman! Mother used to marvel how he could have grown up that way, since his father, who used to take boys to tutor in his own home, was said to have given him and them a very strict up-bringing. His mother, Katrina Klincke, born in Alsace, was an inexorable housekeeper. Her exacting ways have cropped out in full force in one of our aunts; and in later years I’m not sure but this great-grandmother wields an influence over my sister and me—we cannot be comfortable in disorder or slack housekeeping, nor—more’s the pity!—can we let any one else be.
My paternal ancestry is French and, probably, Scottish. Father used to say we were descended on his father’s side from one of the celebrated French Revolutionists, an intimate of Napoleon’s and Josephine’s; but my grandparents and great-grandparents were born in the Land of the Drumlins. When, some years ago, the memoirs of our reputed French ancestor were published, bringing to light his brilliant but unscrupulous career, I took a mischievous pleasure in sending Father the particularly scathing comments concerning “our ancestor.”
My father was the fifth child in a family of ten; his father died in early adult life, presumably of tuberculosis, though Father would never admit it. Two of his sisters had the same disease, and, because of my resemblance to one of them, and my not robust health in childhood, I was something of an object of solicitude in early girlhood, though all fears on that score vanished long ago. I have heard that my paternal grandfather drank to excess, and know that one of his sons did, which may largely account for my father’s life-long zeal for the Temperance Cause. His mother, of Scottish descent, left with a large family, was brave, strong, and resourceful to an unusual degree. Their little log-house being miles away from a neighbour, once during a big snow-storm lasting several days they had nothing in the house to eat but potatoes and salt. “But we ate them and were glad to get them,” said Father, who added, “We can never know how much inward anxiety Mother felt at such times, but whatever it was, none but herself ever knew.”
We children called her “the other Grandma,” for she then lived “way out West” (in Michigan), and we never saw her but once. I remember her serious face, which could look very merry when she smiled; and her black gown with a purple stripe running through it. She was at our house on one of my early birthdays and helped us smoke glass to look at a total eclipse of the sun. When she died, a cousin came running down the hill waving a yellow paper and saying breathlessly, “Grandma is dead!” And she smiled when she said it! A sensitive girl, overcome with the importance of being the bearer of such news, her smile, I know now, was a purely nervous manifestation; but I could not judge her leniently then. Moved by the grief of my parents, I wept to see them weep, but the shadow passed quickly; not so the resentment I held toward that cousin for her untimely smile.
As youth passes one longs for fuller knowledge of the lives that preceded one’s own. We are the result of all that has gone before, but how often important figures are missing; and even when not, how inexplicable the sum total is! Lives cut off in our childhood and youth, or perhaps before we were born, may have endowed us with this or that constitutional bias, this weakness, that strength—to which of them do I owe this fault?—is this trait, for which I am commended, my own, or my great grandmother’s?—insoluble complexities, yet how we seek an answer, here and there, as we study our tree of life from the roots up!