My Inheritance, Part 2

I have to admit, the pattern cabinet as an inheritance was rather unexpected on my part - well, not totally unexpected, I guess, since I'm the only one in the family who does much with sewing clothing. Since then, however, I've received a second inheritance from my grandmother, and it was the one I was really, really hoping for.

A long time ago (I'm not even sure when), I gave Grandma one of those "Grandma's Album" journals that had blank pages with writing prompts as a Christmas present (I think it was Christmas). This little note is written on the first flyleaf:

Oct. 11, 1999 - Greta, Mother always told me it was an evil wind that blew no good. So maybe these sick bouts I have had for the last 3 months have had some good in them. At least, not being able to do anything else has given me a chance to write in the album. Grandma.

Most of the pages that follow are crammed full of content, ranging from family stories Grandma wrote out by hand, to pictures of my family going back to my great-grandparents and forward to my own children, to little notes and Valentine cards drawn by me, my sisters, and my cousins.

What a treasure! I knew Grandma had filled out the book, because she had mentioned it to me in person a couple of times, but I had no idea how much she had put in there. A lot of the content was also stuff I hadn't seen before, like a picture of my dad on his tricycle when he was maybe three years old. There are also pictures of things I had seen but forgotten, like the picture of all the clothes she had made for family members for Christmas one year.

The best part, though, are the stories. Some of them are short, like the one about her being "Marigold" in the senior play and having to cry a lot for the role. Others fill two complete pages with close-set handwriting, with little added notes stuck in catty-cornered with details she remembered after the fact. I knew the basic factual outlines of some of the stories, such as that Grandma and Grandpa got married and wanted to keep it secret for a while. But these versions of the story are more detailed than I ever heard them told, and it really brings the stories to life. Priceless, absolutely priceless, both as a granddaughter and as a writer.

I feel very fortunate in that I have stories from both my mother (she wrote a book - as a novel - about her early childhood) and now from my grandmother, from opposite sides of my family. I think it's important that someone in a family write down the stories - not just the "factual" stories, but the way the facts affected people. And both of these stories have something personal added to them; Grandma's is written in her handwriting and in her voice, and my mom's has wonderful little sketches she made of things like the sorghum cane harvest. Priceless.

Looking through the book this week, it was like visiting with Grandma again, even though she's been gone nearly 12 years.

My Inheritance

About six weeks ago, my last grandparent passed from this life to the next. Grandpa was just a few weeks shy of his 97th birthday, which would have been this past week. Since that time, his children have been going through and dividing up his belongings, which in this case also included the belongings of his wife, who died about 11 years ago.

Grandma was an incredible seamstress who made clothes for everyone in the family, from three-piece suits for the men to frilly "doll dresses" for the little girls. I'm really the only one of the children or grandchildren who makes much clothing - others in the family are talented with quilting or doll-making. So when it came time to bequeath Grandma's cabinet full of clothing patterns, I was the recipient.

When I say "full of clothing patterns," I am being quite literal. The cabinet is a commerical pattern cabinet, probably purchased when a fabric store was changing its inventory or going out of business (though I'm not sure about that). Of its four drawers, three are simply stuffed with patterns. One of the drawers (seen in the above picture) held a number of boxes with brand-new zippers, sorted according to color. (The boxes, by the way, are another of Grandma's hobbies - she covered cardboard boxes with wallpaper scraps to make storage containers that are beautiful as well as functional).

Since Grandma died in the late 20th century, most of the patterns are pretty badly dated. I don't know how old the oldest patterns in the cabinet are, but I know they will probably go back to the 1970s and maybe even earlier. The night the cabinet was delivered, my daughter had quite a lot of fun looking through the old clothing styles. Because I've been so busy with the end-of-year grading and with finishing up my chapter of the university's self-study report, we haven't had a chance to go through them since that night. It's something I'm looking forward to for this summer (after I'm through with the summer class I'm teaching). The good news is, some styles seem to be coming back into fashion, judging from what I've seen while shopping for my daughter (I once said - aloud - "When did clothes from my high school years come back into style?!!"). Maybe we can find some patterns that we can use this summer to give Lily a very fashionable wardrobe to take back to school in the fall.

One thing about Grandma that made her unique is that she drew a lot of her own patterns by copying from a piece of store-bought clothing (another useful skill she taught me - hooray!). One section of one drawer is devoted to the homemade patterns, all of which are in regular white envelopes and labeled, in Grandma's handwriting, with the name of the person the pattern was for, the size or person's age, and a brief description of the piece. I could tell Lily was beginning to feel a little left out as she saw pattern after pattern drawn for cousins and (especially) for her brother. I told her not to expect to find one, because she was only two years old when Grandma died, and so there wasn't a lot of time for Grandma to have made something for her. However, she kept looking, and eventually she found two envelopes with her name, including one for a Valentine's Day dress full of ruffles made when Lily was three months old.

It was really cool (for lack of a better word) to see Lily's satisfaction at being part of the legacy. I look forward to exploring this inheritance with her this summer, and maybe to pass on this tradition to another generation.

Oh, The Irony!

One thing I forgot while I was writing my sad little post about our missing dog last night - not all dog stories have sad endings! I should have remembered Lassie Come-Home, since I read (and loved) it when I was a kid. Tracy pulled a Lassie today, reappearing in the yard just as mysteriously as she disappeared. She's limping a little, and she really went after the food in her bowl, but otherwise, she seems absolutely normal.

How I wish she would pull a Martha (from Martha Speaks) so she could fill us in on where she's been! Did she follow our neighbor when he came to fix his fence Friday and get lost, spending the last three days wandering in the bottomlands along the creek? Was she dog-napped and only now managed to escape? Was she abducted by aliens and released after their examination of this earthly life form was complete? Was she being a drama queen who got jealous of our attention to the cats and ran away from home for a couple of days? Did she just need a little time alone? She's not saying, so I guess it will always be a mystery.

The biggest irony is, my daughter reported there's a new dog hanging around the place, and my husband said he saw a strange truck pass very slowly earlier in the evening. Probably someone has dumped an unwanted dog on us (again). So we are going to go from having no dog on the farm to having two (although maybe this dog will take up with one of our neighbors, hope, hope.....).

If There's a Dog on the Cover, It Ends Sad

The title of this post is "advice" my son has given my daughter before about books. He is, of course, referring to books like Old Yeller and Where the Red Fern Grows that just tear your heart out when the dog dies at the end. Well, this weekend, we had our own sad ending for our faithful dog of 13 years, Tracy.

When a dog gets to be that old, you know you won't have much more time with them. What's weird is that Tracy wasn't sick. She just disappeared Friday. She went for a walk with me Friday morning, but when we came home from a long day at band practice and uniform fittings, she wasn't there to greet us by trying to climb into the vehicle, as she normally does. We haven't seen her since. Because Tracy wasn't the type of dog to run around the neighborhood, we're pretty sure something has happened to her.

But what? As I said, she stayed around the yard most of the time. We checked the ditches up and down our country road, in case she might have wandered out to the road and been hit by a car - nothing. We looked in the horse pasture, because she had recently decided it's great fun to bark at the horse, who usually bucks and kicks in response. We thought maybe she was foolish enough to bark at him within kicking distance, but there was no sign of her. We wondered if maybe she went visiting our neighbor's little dog (who comes by pretty regularly), but he showed up today briefly, looking for her, I guess. She hadn't been sick, just a little arthritic in one hip. I guess it will always be a mystery. The sad thing is, we lost another dog last summer in almost the same fashion - she just disappeared.

So, in the best "dog story" fashion, here are a few words about Tracy. She came to us as a puppy from the local shelter, the only pet we've chosen for ourselves (all the other dogs we've had over the years were dumped off along our country road and chose us). As a puppy, she was a chewer - I remember she pulled a quilt off the clothesline once and tore a hole in it that I had to mend. When we got a second dog, she quit chewing on things and chewed on him instead. She was always curious, getting up from her comfortable "cool" spot even on these dreadfully hot days this summer to come with me to the clothesline or the barn. Many dogs get grumpy as they get older; Tracy seemed to get sweeter and more loving. She would "talk" to us by whining, especially to my husband, who I think was her favorite.

Several times already today, I've looked for her when I went outside. It's going to be lonely around here without her.

"Pantsing" the Family Vacation

One of the questions I see fairly often on blogs about writing is "Are you a plotter or a pantser?" By that, the questioner is asking whether the writer plans every detail of what will happen in his/her story or if he/she goes "by the seat of the pants" and lets the story go where it will. The same question could be asked of traveling style. Normally, my husband and I are "plotters" when it comes to planning the family vacation, but this year we decided to try "pantsing" it.

We knew we wanted to go to the East Coast since we had a window of only two weeks. We had settled on going to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and our son had requested going back to Washington, DC. We planned to leave immediately after our daughter's concert for band camp (the flute came on the trip with us!) on June 18 and we had to be home by July 1 so our son could get his driver's license. We planned to stay in hotels for most of the trip, but we also wanted to do a couple of nights of tent camping. With those parameters in mind, we stuffed the back of our vehicle with tents, sleeping bags, two suitcases, and numerous duffel bags and headed east.

The first opportunity for spontaneity came when we hit Memphis at suppertime.

We headed to Beale Street to BB King's Blues Club, where we had horrendously fattening and wonderfully delicious Southern fare and were treated to live music by a blues band whose guitarist most certainly wasn't born yet when Elvis died (but who could play the guitar, for sure). The spirit of the spontaneous slid into my husband and me, who mortified our daughter by pretending to dance at the table. Pantsing is fun!

We saw the downside of pantsing a couple of hours later, when we stopped in Jackson, TN, for the night. No rooms were available in our first choice of hotels - seems the Miss Tennessee pageant and a Little League baseball tournament were both in town. We did find a room, however, without too much trouble.

Our next stop was Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We've been there several times, and we've passed by the sign for Laurel Falls several times but never stopped. This time we decided to stop and do the hike. What we didn't know is that it was a 1.3-mile uphill hike! When we were nearly to the falls, someone coming back down told us there was a bear and cub on the trail. By the time we got to the spot, there was no cub, but there was the adult bear, sitting in the path. This was really cool to us since we've been to the Smokies several times and to Yellowstone and never saw a bear in the wild. Pantsing has pleasant surprises!

One of the things we did this time that we hadn't done before was go to some places just because we saw them on the map and thought they sounded interesting. The first of those was the Mountain Farm Museum at the North Carolina entrance to GSM park.

It ended up being one of my favorite stops on the trip, partly because there were so many things that reminded me of my great-grandparents' farm (like the corn-sheller) and partly because it was THE setting for my novel. Several times I had little moments of daydreaming in which I could almost see my characters leaning against the rail fence or carrying wood from the pile under the woodshed. This visit also pointed out to me, though, how far removed my kids are from the way I grew up - my daughter helped feed the two young pigs with one hand pinching her nose shut because of the smell!

Another jewel that we visited just because we found it on the map was Chippokes Plantation State Park in Virginia. We got a private tour of a plantation home circa 1854 (well, ok, no one was there besides our family) and to visit a museum of farm equipment and implements. We also stopped at Seneca Rocks in West Virginia because we would be passing it on the way home, and that was neat. The Seneca Rocks themselves are a huge, impressive outcropping of rocks, but again, the cool part to me was a homestead site that had the home and some gardens with vegetables and herbs people of the 19th century would have grown. Both of those sites are things we would have missed if we had chosen to take the interstates rather than pantsing our way on side roads.

There were some interesting stops that crossed our path quite by accident. While in Asheville, North Carolina, we ate at the most impressive McDonald's restaurant I've ever seen.

Since that is the location of the Biltmore estate (which we didn't visit because it was too expensive for our budget), the McDonald's had a "Biltmore" theme, complete with a tapestry over a faux fireplace, a waterfall wall sculpture, and a player baby grand piano.

Another time, we were driving toward Washington, DC, and we saw a big spire sticking up above the trees.

"What's that?" Jeff asked, and we exited to find out. It was the National Museum of the Marine Corps, which was a great museum with LOTS of history (although it was, of course, oriented toward military history and specifically the Marines' role in that history). When we got to Washington, we visited Arlington National Cemetery - just in time to see a wreath-laying ceremony with the Prince of Belgium. Wow. What dumb luck! Finally, we got to see first-hand what Jeff called an example of political "pork." We drove for several miles on a beautiful 4-lane interstate in West Virginia that began outside a very small town and suddenly dumped us off in what seemed like the middle of nowhere (miles from the next town of any size). That was a weird experience that took us pretty far off the path we had planned, led nowhere, and forced us to find an alternative route back to where we wanted to be. I guess that happens sometimes with pantsing.

As it turns out, we didn't take quite the route we had thought we might take - no swinging up into Delaware and Baltimore. But we got to do all the things we really wanted to do on the trip - play in the ocean and go on a fishing boat (Jeff and the kids did that - I discovered I'm really not a fan of deep water, boats, and long, long bridges, ha ha!), visit Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, see all the relatives in that part of the country, and camp a couple of times. There were some stressful moments, but seems like maybe there weren't as many as when we've had to push to get to a certain location by a certain time (or at least a different kind of stress). After the first night, we had no trouble finding a place to stay. Taking the vehicle off the interstates and on the backroads let us see something of the countryside and the way people live, which I think is just as valuable as any museum. The verdict? I like pantsing some of a vacation and hope we'll do it again sometime. Just as with a story idea, we can take the basic framework, get started, and see where it takes us!

Good Advice from an Author

I'm getting along pretty well with my A to Z Reading Challenge so far; I just finished Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis. It was all right. I like reading children's books, but this one was a little younger than I really prefer. That's not to say anything bad about the book. Curtis did well with maintaining the suspense of the story throughout, and I learned something about the racism that African-Americans faced during the Depression era.

The best thing I took away from the book, though, came in the author's note at the end - actually in the last paragraph.

"Be smarter than I was: Go talk to Grandma and Grandpa, Mom and Dad and other relatives and friends. Discover and remember what they have to say about what they learned growing up. By keeping their stories alive you make them, and yourself, immortal."

My grandfather on my mother's side just turned 99 about a week ago. When I think about everything that has happened in his lifetime, it's pretty amazing. He was about 7 when the U.S. entered World War I, 18 when the stock market crashed, a young married during the Great Depression, in his 30s during World War II. He witnessed Sputnik, the assassination of JFK, Watergate, the fall of the Berlin wall, the fall of the Twin Towers. When he was a child, cars were uncommon. He has only an 8th-grade education, because people had to pay tuition to attend high school, and he needed to work to help support the family, anyway. Now -- although he doesn't use them! -- we have tools that can instanteously communicate with people around the world, and that can store an entire music library on something smaller than a deck of cards. Think of the stories he could tell!

The same thing is true of my father's father. He's a youngster at 94, ha ha. He actually served in the Pacific in World War II, including the Battle of Midway.

But....I haven't heard their stories and probably won't. When we were both younger, I didn't even think about doing it. Now that I realize it, it's not going to happen. For one thing, they aren't exactly forthcoming with the stories. For another, I'm intimidated by them, sad to say. I might feel differently about it if it were my grandmothers. In fact, I do remember hearing some stories from my paternal grandmother about when she was first married and lived in a house with big cracks between the floorboards. The problem is, I didn't write those down, and now she's gone. All I have are the rather faded memories of the conversation.

Maybe kids will take Curtis' advice. But just in case my grandchildren are intimidated by me (ha!) I'm going to try to write down a few things and use scrapbooking to help preserve "how it used to be."