Where the Walls are Soft…

Aunt Blanche – 192?

The last
words
Gramma would
say to my
mom and
Helen were always,
“And don’t let Blanche
do all the work!”Aunt Blanche was my mother’s older sister. She was the first born – and she wasn’t very old before my grandmother realized she was a little, well, different. I suppose the proper, “politically correct” term to describe Blanche would be mentally challenged. She never went to school, never held a job, and never married.

I have a photo of Ky, when she was about 4, that looks just like Blanche. Ky hates that picture, which is why I’m going to dig it up someday and post it, ‘cuz I think it’s cute that she looks like a modern-day version of my Aunt Blanche, and I’m the Mom, and she can’t stop me.

Blanche held a very special place in my grandmother’s household, and was quite responsible in many ways. She had chores to do, like everyone else, and managed nicely in most cases. She would get upset, now and again, if things didn’t go in the order she thought they should.

My mother had a knack for calming her down in these situations. She could usually convince Blanche that since she was the oldest she should do the thing she didn’t want to do, or not do the the thing she wanted to do, because, being the oldest, she should consider what was best for all concerned and “take the high road”. Blanche always wanted the best for the family, and would generally concede the point.

There are a few snippets of “Blanche Stories” that I’m going to post over the next while. This is one of them:

My mother’s kin were farmers – and the largest meal was the one at midday, which they called “dinner” rather than “lunch”. That was the meat-and-potatoes meal, served with several loaves of fresh homemade bread, baked just after breakfast, many pots of tea, and something sweet to finish up with, usually pie or a jelly-roll, also made fresh that morning. There were eight kids in that family, three girls and five boys, Gramma and Grampa, and however many hands they might have on the farm to feed before the men went back out to work.

Every afternoon after dinner, Gramma would either lay down for a nap, or take a walk into town to sell eggs or run her errands. My mother, her younger sister, Helen, and Blanche would be left to wash the dinner dishes. The mountain of dinner dishes. The last words Gramma would say to my mom and Helen were always, “And don’t let Blanche do all the work!”

Because Blanche would, if you let her.

So, my mom and Helen would wait ’til Gramma was down the driveway, or sleeping, and they would tell Blanche that they were going to the outhouse. And they would say to her, “Don’t you dare do all the dishes without us!” The dishes were very lovely bone-china pieces from a shop owned by Gramma’s sister. None matched – they were “seconds” given to Gramma, that couldn’t be sold because of a chip here and there. Blanche believed that Mom and Helen enjoyed washing the dinner dishes, because the plates were so pretty.

So, Mom and Helen would go out the kitchen door, and sneak around the corner of the house to peek in the kitchen window. Blanche did enjoy washing dishes. And eventually, when they didn’t come back right away, she would go ahead and wash them all, and the pots and pans afterward.

It’s here I must remind you, that the farmhouse had no running water. There was a well, and a pump, but the water was hauled by hand, in buckets, and heated up on the woodstove. None of this turning a faucet and filling a sink with hot water, the way we have it, now.

When they still weren’t back from the outhouse, Blanche would dry everything and put it all away, mumbling to herself that if Maude and Helen were going to take so long, it was their own fault they didn’t get to help. She always thought she was getting one over on them by doing the dishes by herself.

Of course, once the kitchen was all cleaned, Mom and Helen would come back, look around angrily, and yell at Blanche, threatening to tell Gramma on her and get her into trouble. It wasn’t fair that Blanche should get to wash all the dishes, just because she was older than they were. Blanche would beg them not to, and they would reluctantly agree, if she would promise not to do it again.

But, of course, the next day after dinner…

Random Song-for-the-Day: “Let’s Dance” – David Bowie

“Little Red Shoes”
Taken October 20, 2007 with Canon PowerShot A550

My mom
was
the teacher
you didn’t want
to get,
because you couldn’t
get away with any
monkey business, and you might even (OMIGOD!) learn something!The Little Red Shoes sit in my mother’s Etagiere, if I spelled that correctly. Elle? Wanna let me know, Betch?! My mom calls it a “What-Not”. I think it’s because it’s to display all your knick-knacks and what-not in. Anyway, that’s where the Little Red Shoes are, when they’re not in the bathtub, with me and my camera. Bathtubs make great backgrounds for some pictures. Wet bathtubs are not necessarily good for cameras, but mine’s tough.

I love the Little Red Shoes, but I don’t have a story about them. I just couldn’t come up with a pic for the post.

I’m having trouble catching up with all the posts I have in draft. Hence the title – “Mish-Mash” is about what this one will be – just a couple of bits and pieces that I’d like to get out of my hard drive and onto the blog. This clip from today’s post by Cardiogirl reminded me of a bit about my mom when she was a kid, which, in turn, reminded me of one about Ruby’s mom…

clipped from www.cardiogirl.net

cardiogirl.net/">

So essentially we have a socially-accepted version of a wealthy pretty woman (former Ford model who must have earned a lot of cash) whose hobby is traveling the globe and shopping. So she finds “amazing stuff” and brings it back to New York to re-sell it. Do I have that right? I thought so.

And these aren’t your mother’s baubles. A telephone table finished in frog skin. I’m understanding this, though I find it crazy, until I get to the shagreen part. What is shagreen? Is it like shazam?

A million years ago, when my mom was a little girl of about 12, she and her sister were down at the nearby fishin’ hole with their cousin. My mom is the older of the three, but for some reason, it was Auntie and Cuz that did the ordering around of my mom. This was the story that made me realize that my mom was a little mouse when she was a kid. How she managed to grow up into a stern (SERIOUSLY stern) School Marm, I will never know. My mom was the teacher you didn’t want to get, because you couldn’t get away with any monkey business, and you might even (OMIGOD!) learn something!

At any rate (as Mom would say), they were down at the fishin’ hole, dib-dabbling around in the water, when the conversation turned to frog legs. As an appetizer. Because that was what the rich people ate. Probably every day, even. Imagine, they told each other, all the rich people in the big cities paying unbelievable amounts of money for a plate of frog legs, when there were hundreds of frog legs attached to hundreds of frogs right in front of them. For free.

And so Auntie and Cuz decided that they wanted frog legs for dinner. My mother didn’t think that was a very good idea. She thought it might be a little hard on the frogs. Auntie and Cuz didn’t give a damn about what the frogs thought of the idea, and they didn’t give much of a damn what my mom thought about it, either. They just sent my mom up to the house to get a knife. And my mom went. Slooooowly.

The whole walk up for a knife, she tried to think of a way to save those frogs. She couldn’t think of a thing. She considered just not going back to the fishin’ hole, but decided she might pay for that later, so instead, when she got to the kitchen she decided she would bring back a dull butter knife. She reasoned that it would hurt the frogs less than a sharp one would. At 12, my mom was all for “less hurt”, apparently, but all she can do now when she tells the story is laugh over the swearing from Auntie over that dull knife not getting the job done. I guess they didn’t get their frog leg dinner that day, but there were probably a few pissed off frogs in the fishin’ hole before they gave up.

Ruby’s mom, now, would have got the legs off those frogs lickety-split. She was a woman who got things done (she also had no forearms – there’s a story for the blog, huh? Soon. Honest.).

Despite being a woman who “got things done”, Ruby’s mom had a heart of gold, and hated to see any animal suffer. She lived a hard, rough life on a farm, though, and there were times that some animals just had to be “taken care of”. Chickens had to be killed. Pigs had to be slaughtered. Sometimes, you had to shoot your dog. And there were always kittens that couldn’t be kept, and had to be “taken care of”.

Ruby’s mom hated that job, but it had to be done. She believed that the most humane way to “take care of” kittens was to drown them. Most people would shove the kittens in a burlap sack and tie it shut, and pitch the poor buggers in the nearest river. Not Ruby’s mom. That wasn’t humane enough for Ruby’s mom.

No, Ruby’s mom would pull on a pair of heavy gloves, fill a pail full of water and, one by one, she would hold each kitten (gently) under the surface until it was dead. Oh yeah, and she would make sure to fill the pail with warm water, so the little dears wouldn’t die cold.

Random Song for the Day: “Alive” – Pearl Jam