Wednesday, March 14, 2007

WRITING CLASS 03-13-07

Tell It Like It Is
03/13/07
Gwendie Camp

Although I spent a lot of time as a child with adults—grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles—and so spent a lot of time watching what they did, very little of it has been directly applicable in my own life. The world has turned too many times for those skills to transfer. Like my Grandmother Luba canning guavas, or my Pa building sea skiffs by himself, or Grandmother Hunter gathering eggs, or Granddaddy killing a chicken and plucking the feathers off. Even my parents’ skills are obsolete. Daddy mending fishing nets with fid and cord, and Mama tatting lace with her shuttle and fine thread. Even ironing, which I watched all the women in my family do, is only a memory to me, although I have done it, but never well.

What I have learned from watching what they did to see how it’s done is to read a newspaper every day, take off my work shoes in the house, and to share simple things with others—food, tools, time, love.

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I despise dusting.

I’m more like my two grandmothers than I am like my mother in the dusting department. My mother was a duster, at least until she got too laid up with arthritis to move around easily, and then cobwebs appeared in her corners, just like they did at my grandmothers houses. And mine.

My mother’s mother was really a gardener at heart, not a housekeeper, and so what little time she had “left over” she spent in her yard. She loved cut flowers, and both her spotless yard and her dusty house were always filled with her flowers. For years, my mother would set aside a week in the summer to gather up my sister and me and take us back to her mother’s house, where she would clean and dust and knock down cobwebs and polish silverware and lay down new paper in the cabinets. And Grandmother would prune and weed and cut flowers out in the yard and arrange them in tall vases, and I would lie in a hammock strung between two palm trees and read all day long. At the end of the week all the rooms in Grandmother’s house would be washed and dusted and we would go home to our own well-dusted house.

My father’s mother was even more cavalier about dust. She didn’t have a daughter who would come home every summer and do a major housecleaning. As her eight children, one by one, left home to set up their own households, she just closed the door on the unused bedrooms and let them be. Her kitchen, which she did use, was spotless, and so was her front porch, that being where she spent most of her last years, sitting in a metal rocker in the shade, listening to the dust settle inside.

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Cedar chests. When I was a teenager, girls still had “hope chests”, usually cedar chests that held a gradually accumulating assortment of embroidered tea towels, lace-edged pillow cases, and monogrammed washcloths. Hope chests were such a part of the Southern culture that a furniture store in town gave every high school girl a miniature cedar chest as a graduation present.

My sister has my mother’s cedar chest. My sister and I were too close to the liberated generation of women to be interested in hope chests for ourselves. But now my mother’s cedar chest holds the past, not the future—quilts and coverlets my mother and grandmother made, doilies they crocheted, pillowcase lace they tatted. Time has reversed itself.