Memoirs of Don and Emily - part 2

Note: Again, this is a more expanded version of a post I made to our family online group. I take a bit more license here to be more honest and less politically correct than I was with my family. My reasons for doing so may be a bit obscure at the moment but over time, it may become more apparent.

Also, to clarify, Don and Emily are my grandparents on my father's side.

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Watching Grandma and Grandpa interact with one another during my year with them was sometimes an adventure, sometimes a treat, other times curious and always educational, even if to determine, "Hey, I better not do that!" Grandma and Grandpa had been married for a lot of years and that meant a successful relationship, right? Ummmm, yes. In many ways, yes. In other ways, not so much but to be fair, I think most relationships are like this. Some couples live together for decades and cannot be said to have a successful relationship. Many times, they have just been roommates for a very long time and avoided divorce only because it was supposedly, "bad."

Other couples do have successful relationships and after a few years of learning how, they move right along, happy and content and able to confront issues with maturity and tact. Note, I did not say, "without anger and strife." Successful couples can still get frustrated and angry with each other but how they deal with those issues is what makes their relationships succeed.

Those are the two ends of the bell curve. Most normal people reside somewhere in the middle, of course, as did Grandma and Grandpa. From day to day, they might even move back and forth along the curve from good, to better and back again. There were some indications that Grandma and Grandpa might have been better off divorcing, however, they were comfortable with each other and could manage their feelings because of their vast experiences with each other.

Grandpa used to grow the most beautiful garden. His green thumb could be seen from space, to be sure. Or at least, from the top of the water tower! It was a luxury beyond compare to have the best and freshest produce of my life. During season of course. When the apricots came on, I indulged to the point of being stupid about it. It didn't matter how much I ate, though, I could never put a dent in the production of that apricot tree. I've never enjoyed store-bought apricots since because they simply don't have nearly the exquisite flavor I remember. Grandpa gave them away by the bucket load and still finished the apricot season by dumping a lot of it in the trash. Even the birds had their fill. The same was true of the peaches, plums, nectarines, etc. Grandpa wanted all of them and had them. Even a pomegranate tree, a fig tree and a Thompson seedless grape arbor!

I think Grandma was the only one who bore a slight resentment about all the produce but probably not just because of the produce itself. The problem was, Grandpa would get up first thing in the morning before the birds, even, and go pick all the produce in the garden that had ripened the previous day. Later, Grandma would go into the kitchen after getting up and find several dozen pounds of produce in the kitchen, on the counters, in the sink, in a bag on the floor, all waiting for something to be done to it. Grandma complained a bit. Not a lot. She knew the benefit of the garden but dangit; she just didn't like the frequent surprise and the implied expectation that it was her job to deal with all of this. She never complained to Grandpa about it that I heard, though. She mentioned it up to me just once after weeks of putting up various produce.

Then she rolled up her sleeves and canned or dried all of it. I would come home at the end of the day to a kitchen counter and a dining room table loaded down with jars of apricots, corn, green beans, peaches, or whatever else she had spent the day preserving. The jars were beautiful. Most of them disappeared into the basement storage and were never seen again, unfortunately, but there were plenty of times when we did retrieve a jar during the winter for a dessert. Good stuff. A significant amount of that stored produce, unfortunately, went bad as things do and had to be disposed. This was more of a testament to how much produce was harvested and canned by Grandma and Grandpa rather than that they didn't necessarily handle it right. It was just too much for them to keep up with.

Two things drove them to create all of this sustenance: The church was a driving force for food storage and insisted that people put up a year's supply to carry people in the event of an disaster. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course. In the early years, however, the church didn't promote the management of such storage and quite a few families out there put up food only to find that they hadn't taken care of it properly and it became a total loss. Grandma and Grandpa seemed to know what they were doing but were overwhelmed with the quantity of food they produced and they refused to waste any of their garden's production. Church duty called and they kept working it.

I wonder just how many people these days even know how to do this any more? Is there any need any more? Grandma wasn't about to waste any of it, that's for sure, and Grandpa wasn't about to not grow it so long as he had space to grow stuff. The other driving force behind their production and storage was that they had been children of hard times and they worked hard and sweated and bled and produced for themselves and then saved and saved and saved, whether it was money or the production of their garden. They were the hardest working people I ever met alongside my maternal grandparents and nothing ever stopped them.

In spite of a few minor snipes they directed toward each other, they never fought with each other while I stayed with them in Thatcher. There were a couple of occasions when Grandma would bring up something Grandpa had done thirty years ago and he would sit there nodding his head and giving an, "Uh huh," now and again. Later, he would tell me, "I suppose that actually happened but for the life of me, I can't remember it. It's just not worth arguing about." He was right; it wasn't worth arguing about but if she had a reason to bring it up to him again these many years later, who was he to say that her need was not important? Let her go on about it. There was a minor complaint in his comment but not to her.

By the same token, Grandpa would undertake to accomplish a project to the inconvenience of Grandma and her daily comfort. The garden produce was a significant example. She complained to me a couple of times in terms of, "I wish he wouldn't . . , " but she didn't mention it to him. She knew it made him happy to be doing things and working on something or other. I'm sure that if they had lived in Thatcher long enough, Grandpa would have had a skyscraper on the property, built by his own hand still producing fruits and vegetables worthy of a property with five times the acreage!

There was a plaque hanging in the kitchen which I'll never forget. I don't recall if Grandpa made it or bought it in a store but it expressed his feelings for Grandma in, "the most perfect terms," his words to me. It said,

"I don't love you because I need you, I need you because I love you."

This profound statement has remained with me ever since. It suggests more thought than I can even write out over time and the more I reflect on it, the more meaning it has and the more I engage in a relationship with my life mate, the more it suggests what that relationship is all about. I seem to recall that Grandpa had given the plaque to Grandma later on in their relationship, something that bears a great deal of meaning well beyond the empty platitudes a young man often uses to flatter his woman.

After so many years of marriage, Grandpa was still deeply in love with his wife. Grandma was in love with her man. Quite often, I could see it in their eyes when they spoke of each other to me in private. When Grandpa told me of the plaque and how he felt about it and about Grandma, his eyes grew misty and touched with an emotion that he wouldn't ever let out for another person. He never let it out for me to see except for that small bit that he couldn't hide, then he moved on to a different topic. Grandma sometimes told stories of Grandpa's past accomplishments with a similar touch of feeling in her face and a barely perceptible tremble in her voice which spoke of admiration, adoration and pride.

When it is said, "Love knows no bounds," I think it's right and good to say that Grandma and Grandpa were an example of that kind of love.

--Wag--