IN MY GRANDMOTHER'S HOUSE

The house on this homestead – the house which we now make our own -- was my grandmother’s dream house. She realized her dream in 1917 when a bumper bean crop made construction possible. The house was built by a “Mr. Philpot” who came up from Peck, as I understand it.

The house isn’t haunted – except by my own sense of history. “The melody lingers on,” as it were. This part of living here is hard for me. Sometimes it’s not easy to come face to face with the past – a past that doesn’t always include me but belongs to me anyway. Yesterday – a cold and rainy August day – I sat in the livingroom and read letters my grandmother wrote to my dad. They aren’t an easy read – the handwriting is difficult and so is the content. The letters tell of Depression-era experience for an elderly couple living in financial insecurity, her frustrations with her husband who grows forgetful while trying to cope with the demands of farming, her concerns for her children and their financial security as they try to establish careers during the Depression -- all woven together with wonderful details of life on the farm, life in this very spot. As I sit in the living room and read the letters, I look to the diningroom where I can almost see her writing at the table.

“There’s no use crying over spilled milk,” she writes on Nov. 21, 1934. “This is a wise saying and ‘worthy of all acceptation.’ Also we shouldn’t go around carrying dead work in the form of past mistakes. We surely do use up a lot of energy that way. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to just blot out all the past blunders and just figure on each day and its problems! That is what we are supposed to do, and yet how we shoulder the past and also fill our hearts with burdens of the future which may never materialize. Poor mortals!”