So here is the picture of my Grandparents that I talked about. You can see why I referred to Grant Woods' "American Gothic".
In almost every picture we have of him, he has that same glum expression. In real life there was such a twinkle in his eyes that it ballanced out the glum expression. Somewhere I have a copy of a picture of him smiling.
Many thanks to my cousin, Ginger for sending it to me.
Grandfather was from Kentucky. I have been told that in the area around Elizabethtown if you throw a rock you are bound to hit a Warren, Clarke or a Mudd, all of whom are related.
As a young man he wanted to be a Priest. He was devoutly Roman Catholic. He joined the Semanary, and was on his way to becoming a Priest, when they found he had Tuberculosis. They wouldn't let him join because of his health.
One of the commmon treatments for TB was to send people to a better climate, and so he was sent to New Mexico, where he recovered his health. That is also where he met my Grandmother, who was also from Kentucky. I believe she was there for the same reasons.
They spent the majority of their lives in New Mexico, but at the end of the Seccond World War, he moved to North Idaho and bought a small dairy farm. Later Uncle Fred bought a piece of timber on a hill adjoining the farm to the East. A quite a bit of the land was "Stump Farm". It had been cleared of timber around the turn of the century, and the stumps remained.
They bought a small John Deere Cat, and cleared the 20 acres of stumps. There was another 20 acres that was in Cottonwood swamp, and they cleared that, making about 80 acres of pasture and 80 acres of timber.
My grandmother was quite frail, so Grandfather ran the house as well as the farm. I have this very cllear memory of him, standing behind her, brushing out her long silver hair, her seaten in her rocking chair.
I have that rocking chair in the basement, in desparate need of some repairs. One side of it is scorched from when it was set too close to the wood stove and almost caught fire. The rocker on one side is broken, where it wore through. I need to go down and get a piece of Cherry to fashion a new rocker.
For posterity as well as posteriors.
2 comments:
THose are such nice memories though...your Grandpa brushing your grandmas hair! And my Dad had an old wooden rocker (with a leather seat) that he gave to my brother (the oldest son) to be handed down thruout the generations. I'm SO GLAD it stayed in the family!!!
And you know I've noticed in LOTS of those old timey pictures, the people aren't smiling.
You've inspired me to post a picture of my grandfater when he was just a baby...it's him and his twenty or twenty one brothers and sisters...they had an ENORMUS family!!!
PQ: Growing up, I thought everyone had families like ours. It wasn't until I got out in the world that I saw we were the exception rather than the rule.
Back then, big families were a lot more common than now.
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