Grandma

Lately I've been thinking about my grandma, my dad's mom - Helen Kublick. Grandma and Grandpa lived on about 10 acres on the outskirts of the tiny village of Minitonas. We lived about 8 miles from them when I was growing up but despite routine visits to their farm, it always seemed like a planet in another universe. They had a ramshackle old farmhouse full of wondrous curiosities like an old gramophone in the upstairs bedroom, a china doll with real hair and azure colored eyes that flickered back and forth in her crackled porcelain face if you rocked her, dusty fleece from sheep long gone hanging in the cellar and of course the ubiquitous collection of unknown preserves in glass jars. The drinking water came from a well with a wooden lid. Sometimes we got to pull the bucket up and pour it into the crock on the kitchen counter, a chipped enamel ladle hanging at the ready on its edge. I loved that water despite my mom's caution about critters having fallen into the well and meeting their end. My sister and brother and I stayed with Grandma and Grandpa from time to time if my parents went to the city. That's where my most vivid memories of Grandma come from. Grandma making chicken noodle soup and white bread on the wood-burning stove (she had a modern electric stove but preferred to cook over a wood fire) while Grandpa sat at the little kitchen table slowly peeling apples for pies. He didn't talk much so Grandma filled in the silences, instructing us kids on the finer points of making doughnuts or milking cows. She only spoke German to my dad and my grandpa and because English was not her first language, we would often get a blend of the two languages when she couldn't find the English word she was looking for. It didn't really matter.

When we visited in the winter, the little front porch of the house was crowded with a menagerie of jackets and boots and scarves and mittens. This was a working farm and everything was dirty, permeated with the slightly sweet smell of cows. With the early descent of the winter darkness, Grandma would pull on a pair of boots, a heavy coat and mittens. She was a small woman and I remember fitting my footsteps into hers as she would make her way through the snow to the barn for the evening milking. "Cow-boss, cow-boss!" she called only twice and the cows would gather in from the field towards the barn and their stalls. Grandma loved her cows and her cows loved her in return, obligingly and ungrudgingly giving her milk morning and night. There were pigs and chickens and dogs and cats, all of whom responded to grandma's gifted way with animals. I like to think I got a little bit of this gift but Cassidy has received the lion's share. She is every bit like Grandma was with an intuitive knowledge of animals.

Summertime meant visits from the city cousins. We played hide and seek in hay bales past their prime and in the process, someone would occasional discovery of an egg left by a wayward hen. One of us would determine that possession is nine-tenths of the law and the finder then had the privilege of hurling this fragile orb and its pungent, sulfuric contents at the unyielding side of the barn, sending the onlookers laughing and scurrying in the opposite direction. We found no shortage of things to amuse ourselves with. The garden was a riot of flowers,weeds and vegetables, with dill self-sown beyond the garden's borders and into the neighboring ditches. Two apple trees, hardy to the prairie winters, flanked the garden patch and at least half a dozen outbuildings were full to the brim with abandoned chairs, tractor parts, Christmas decorations, derelict bicycles, barbed wire and rusting mouse traps. This was the backdrop for our childhood ramblings and those long hot summer afternoons became legendary in our young minds. Nothing about my grandparents farm was neat or tidy or orderly. Their home was a distinct departure from ours and we loved it.

Then there were those holiday meals at the big table in the dining room. Grandma had known hunger and this knowledge never left her when she came to Canada all those many years ago. She felt certain that behind the abundantly stocked shelves of the Co-op store, hunger still prowled. But she would outwit him. She would save and accumulate and always have something tucked away to buy him off with. Yet with reckless abandon, she would feed her family, reunited and gathered at the dining room table, not just chicken but chicken and roast beef or turkey and ham. It was as though she was making up for the years when there was never enough. Her generosity to us had something of a frantic edge to it. I cannot remember once ever having left her house without a gift of sorts. She had a sideboard in the dining room crammed full of tea towels, soaps, scraps of fabric and zippers and elastic, panties and bras and blouses, all purchased on sale and just in case there should be a need, everything permeated with mothball scent. She would coax open a heavy dark drawer and procure something for my sister and I (yes, sometimes it was panties!) and whatever it was, no matter how outrageous, we were told to politely accept it. My grandparents eventually downsized and moved to town and now that same sideboard sits in my dining room, housing china dishes that I rarely use. I can't bring myself to refinish it and it still smells faintly of mothballs.

It's funny what a person remembers. My memories of Grandma stack up one on top of the other, creating the patina of a woman who faced hardships, who knew work ethic, who did not complain and who was generous to a fault. She died in 1989 shortly after Gerry and I got married. I am certain she knew she was going to die because she phoned my dad and told him she wanted to sell her beloved cows. I had been living at home with my parents for a few months preceding our September wedding and so I went to the farm that late summer afternoon when the trailer came for cattle. Grandma looked small and old. I sat beside her on a log and I could tell she was trying not to cry but I didn't know what to say or do. If I had that moment to relive, I still wouldn't know what to say or do. Maybe I would just hold her hand...