When we took Grandma to their house, our Davis cousins’ enthusiasm at her arrival exceeded ours. The younger ones ran around the car, jumped, and shouted; by the time I was old enough to know what was happening, Susie and Rachel had developed preadolescent dignity and merely exclaimed. The one time we took her to Uncle Jim’s, our cousins there responded more timidly, probably because of our presence. I’m sure that her arrival must have been different when she went to people’s homes to visit rather than to stay.

Twins Dora and Della were born Oct. 1, 1880 in Wisner Township, Franklin County, Iowa.

When she came to stay for a while, though, she started out by settling in. She would enter the house carrying the satchel holding her most important accoutrements and followed by the suitcase-toting driver of the car that brought her. “Put these in my room,” she would direct her valet, adding her satchel and her coat, if she wore one, to the load. If anyone but a member of our family had brought her, she visited until they left (or until the company meal was finished, if there was one) and then went into her bedroom and unpacked. Her unpacking was private; her room was her sanctum, her demesne, and her refuge. The only person who might sometimes be allowed in her room while she arranged it was Mother. (Grandma didn’t want Mother or anyone else cleaning her room, though. Mother assigned me to do it once; Grandma objected, and – never again!) We knew, though, that her suitcase held her clothes – black or navy shirtwaist dresses with little white dots or snowflakes or flowers for Sunday, lighter-colored dresses (lavender and blue were favorites) with tiny prints for every day, her nighties and underthings, and her stockings. Her satchel held her Bible and other reading, her pencils and lined 5” x 8” tablet for letters, knitting needles, her birthday book with its pressed flowers, and whatever project she was working on at the time. Once her things were unpacked and placed to her satisfaction in her closet and in dresser drawers with soapy-scented lavender sachets, she emerged. She would hush us children and, absent obvious indicators like dirty dishes on the table, pathetic whines of hunger, or laundry hanging on the line with rain threatening, would ask Mother, “Eleanor, what would you like me to do?” She tackled her assignments systematically, with focus, and without backtracking, error, or pause.

I remember only one deviation from this routine, although there were probably others. She arrived with Father late in the afternoon to find quarreling children who hadn’t eaten lunch. Pausing only to be sure her suitcase and satchel were stowed in her room, she fed us before unpacking. If I remember, she made our favorite open face sandwiches, ketchup smeared on homemade white bread, topped with Velveeta slices, and broiled until the cheese melted and puffed. Normally they had crisp bacon slices between the ketchup and the cheese, but there was no time to fry it that day. We ate them, and I didn’t notice the absence of bacon until the second or third one. When Mother made the sandwiches, the cheese browned or even scorched delectably on top, but when Grandma made them, they had an alien perfection. We ate them anyway.

Cooking and Baking

Grandma’s main dishes were simple and exquisite: pot roast with or without vegetables, chicken or beef noodle soup with homemade noodles but without vegetables, seven-layer dinner (ham, onions, cabbage, carrots, potatoes, and a choice of two other vegetables), oven-baked chicken with or without stuffing, fried chicken, Swiss steak, meatloaf, baked smoked ham (without glaze), “tuna gravy” (canned tuna in Béchamel sauce or, more simply, canned cream of mushroom soup) over baked potatoes, and the like. She never used herbs in her main dishes. She said, “There’s no need for herbs, if you have good-tasting ingredients to start out with. People only use herbs to cover up the fact that the ingredients don’t have any flavor.”

Grandma made cooking seem effortless. She told me it was. “With a gas stove,” she said, “I don’t have to keep checking the temperature. The stove does it by itself.” At our house, she didn’t have to carry wood for the stove, either, or baby the fire into coals, or dip water from buckets filled by strong young boys and send them to the pump for more. She measured carefully when she baked, sifting the flour twice before she measured and then again after adding the salt and leavening, but she knew when a recipe needed a little extra because the eggs were bigger than usual or a little less, because they were small. The only thing she measured when she cooked meals was salt – one teaspoon for each pound of meat.

Grandma’s bread was light and crusty – even her whole wheat, oatmeal, and rye loaves, varieties that are harder to get light because of the lack of gluten in the flour. She made us wait until the loaves were cool before we cut and ate it because, she said, it would form dough balls that would stay in our stomachs if we ate it warm. I think the real reason was that cutting warm loaves would distort them and form dough balls under the knife, leaving the rest of the loaf difficult to cut. Still, we wanted it warm, so that butter would melt on it and sink in, so that a slice would be buttery all the way through.

Grandma’s banana bread was moist but not heavy, full of banana flavor, and buttery. “The bananas have to be ripe enough,” she said. “They have to have spots. If I still want to eat them, they’re not ripe enough.” It was one of the few baked goods that got better as it aged.

Keeping House

Early in my childhood, we didn’t have a steam iron. That was no hindrance to Grandma, of course; she had never had one. She sprinkled the items to be ironed (bed linens and kitchen towels as well as clothing) with tap water, rolled them tightly, and slipped them into plastic bags to keep them damp until the water seeped into all of the fibers. “People’s clothes end up with wrinkles, because they don’t take the time to sprinkle them evenly,” Grandma explained. She didn’t like the steam iron when Mother got one; wrinkles didn’t come out of the clothes, because the steam didn’t penetrate.

Della (left) and Dora are believed to have been the first women telegraphers in the U.S.

Much of what I learned from Grandma was through observation: how to sweep without stirring up dust, how to pour into a narrow-mouth jar without a funnel and without spilling, and, most important (although it didn’t sink in until much later), how to insert small tasks like getting silverware out of its drawer, or folding towels, or wiping down the counter. into the crevices of time left by waiting for something to happen – for water to boil, for example, or for fresh ears of corn to be brought in from the garden, or for a child to come from another room. She shifted from one task to another efficiently, never scattered or flighty. I’ve been working on that skill for decades without mastering it.

Whistling and Singing

Grandma sang or whistled when she worked around the house, with inexact pitch and a range truncated to just a few steps. It was hard to tell what melody she was aiming for when she sang. That was something she and Father shared gleefully, although he sang with exuberantly exaggerated intervals, in contrast with her minimal variation in pitch. Somehow, we learned the tunes anyway, dark songs like “Two Babes in the Woods” or “My Kitty,” and …, and lighter songs, like a truncated version of “The Bow and Arrow” (appended to GRANDMA-ISMS) or “Someone’s in the Kitchen With Dinah,” and especially Stephen Foster songs – “Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair,” “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” “Way Down Upon the Swanee River,” along with so many others that fell out of favor in the civil rights era. Once, after singing “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” and thinking how reluctant I would have been to go back to all that hard labor, I asked if Grandma thought the people who worked on the plantations really wanted to go back. “I want to go back,” she declared.

Storytelling

Grandma left an impression of quietness, even in conversation. Her liveliest, most natural conversations were with relatives like Uncle Lew (Llewellyn) and Aunt Dell, the only two of her siblings who visited us, and her offspring. They invariably talked about other relatives, some of whom I had never met. I sometimes found the maze of names hard to follow. For example, Grandma and Aunt Dell once reminisced about how mean Frank had been. The only Powell-related Frank I knew was Aunt Dell’s husband; I asked if he were mean. Mother and Grandma assured me that the Uncle Frank who was married to Aunt Dell wasn’t mean, that they were talking about a different Frank.

Even without company, if we asked the right questions, or if the grownups made stimulating comments, Grandma would tell us stories. That’s how we heard her tell about her mother burning her grandparents’ house down on their way back home from Missouri in 1888. (As a child, I had thought that they were going to Minnesota, but now I know that they were returning to their farm in Iowa.) It’s how we heard her way of delegating child care to the oldest son, no matter how he treated the younger children. “Bob was mean to us,” Mother would complain, “and you never stopped him.” “He was good to me,” Grandma would respond.

A few years ago, Frank Rogers (Aunt Dell's husband) told me a story that undermined her report of Bob’s good treatment. He was visiting Grandma at the Keillor farm with his mother. They were shelling peas, he thought, and Bob, in high spirits, was using his most provocative vocabulary. He didn’t stop when Grandma told him to. “Bob,” she said, “your language isn’t fit for human company. Go into the house, and don’t come out until you can control your tongue.” Despite her standard for Bob’s language, Grandma didn’t always adhere to it for herself, according to Rachel Diehl. She did say “shit.” At our house, though, she limited her “bad words” to “drat” and “sugar.”

In the same visit with Frank, he gave me some insight into Uncle Bob’s sarcasm. When Frank was about 14 years old, during one of his frequent visits to the Keillor farm, Harold and Jim Hunt were visiting, too. It was a hot summer day and, feeling thirsty, they went down to the spring. Just as he bent down to put his face into the water to drink, Jim called out, “There’s a dead cat in the spring!” Frank jumped back, and Jim hooted at his joke.

Admiration of Science

In response to one of our childish discussions about the best time in history to have lived, Grandma said she thought she had lived in the best, most amazing period – she had been born in the era of travel by horseback and covered wagon and had lived to see the automobile, the propeller airplane, the jet, and space travel. She was not, though, an early adopter of modern inventions. She didn’t mind riding in cars, but she didn’t want to drive one. She exclaimed over news reports about new jet airplanes and over rockets and dogs or men in space. All of that was wonderful, she said, but she didn’t want to fly. She liked to have her feet on the ground. She swept rather than using the vacuum cleaner. Not only was it loud, she said, but it gobbled things up. “When you use it, “things just go ‘foop!’ and then they’re gone.” It unnerved her. She didn’t care for automatic washers when they came along, although she had welcomed the wringer washer. She didn’t mind the work saved by the electric mixer, but it didn’t whip egg whites as light and tender as a wire whisk. It would have been good for us children to have had a butter churn to crank; it would have taught us perseverance.

Dora's first classroom in Iowa about 1900. Dora with her hair up in a bun is in the middle of the back row.

She had more respect for the inventions and technological innovations of her youth. She opened up about that first when we asked why she drank Postum. She explained that C. W. Post’s science had shown the detriment of caffeine, especially for children, and the health benefits of whole grains. Postum, she said, was made from grain. She also liked his cereals, Grape Nuts and Post Toasties. We asked her why she kept her bedroom window open at night, even in the winter when the temperature was -30, and she told us about John Harvey Kellogg’s advice for healthy living. She followed that advice in moderation, making sure (along with Mother) that we ate plenty of fruit and vegetables – fruit at breakfast, and vegetables or both fruit and vegetables at dinner and supper (always using the farm designations for the meals) and as snacks. However, she rejected his vegetarianism. She ate meat at almost every meal, and she prized sweets. In addition to all of the homemade goodies, she ate commercial candies. At our house, she had lemon drops on hand all the time, she shared our occasional box of filled chocolates, and she delighted in the clove and horehound hard candies that Mother got from Isle’s trading post, when they were available. Horehound candy was rare. I tried it once; she told me I wouldn’t like it, and in fact, I didn’t like its sweet-sour mustiness. When staying with the Davises, Rachel said, Grandma was particularly fond of a tri-colored coconut bar, pink, white, and brown. I never saw it in Isle, but I now see it frequently in dollar stores. Best of all, of course, was Uncle Lew’s candy – lemon drops fresher and more lemony than anything found in a store, peanut brittle, and his melt-in-your- mouth pastel mint patties that were a staple at family weddings when he was alive. Grandma’s apathy toward vegetarianism didn’t reduce her admiration for the man who gave the advice, though. She was particularly intrigued by Kellogg’s inventions, like the “chair that shakes you when you sit in it.” She couldn’t tell us exactly how it benefited people, except that “it helps your innards.” She had never sat in one, or even seen it, but she had seen a picture and had always wanted to try it.

Grandma admired other inventors and scientists, too. When we asked her about not planting vegetables in the same place in the garden two years in a row, she told us about George Washington Carver and his agricultural research, his teaching at Tuskegee, and the wagon he used to take information to the farmers of Alabama. She told us about Booker T. Washington, too, and his role in founding Tuskegee, the finest educational institution in the southern states. She responded to news stories about radiation by asking if we knew about Marie Curie, a woman brave enough violate societal restrictions against a woman becoming a scientist and intelligent enough to discover elements. However, she disapproved of the weaponry made possible by nuclear fission. She admired both Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindberg. She told how she and Aunt Dell had begged their father to let them go with him to the Chicago Exposition of 1893. Their pleas were futile; they were too young. Still, they maintained hope that he would relent until he drove off in the cart.

Social Views

Her admiration of her father, a Populist Progressive and an abolitionist Methodist, was total. His social views were her social views. She got her admiration of science from him, along with optimism that, through science, humans could solve whatever problems we face. She also shared his conviction that women and people of color are equal to white men. The delay in enfranchising women was shameful; women have more sense than men in running things. Mother was completely opposed to this opinion. A married woman, she said, would be obligated to vote the same way her husband voted, or the marriage would be imperiled. That would give married men twice as much voting power as single men. And if a married woman did vote differently than her husband, it would cancel his vote, depriving him of a voice in politics. Grandma dissented. A woman, she said, has her own opinions, whether they agree or disagree with her husband’s ideas, and she should have the right to express them publicly. Women should also have the right to run for public office. That opinion scandalized Mother, who believed that women are the weaker sex, prone to emotionality and irrationality, illness, injury, and mental illness. Women, she said, are totally incapable of any role in government.

Dora and daughters (left to right) Eleanor, Ruth, Josphine and Elizabeth around 1960.

Every woman, her father had taught her, should be educated so that she could support herself; a woman should never be dependent on a man. Marital abuse, she said, was a danger when a woman was dependent on a husband. “When you marry,” she said, “you never know what the man is really like. You need to be ready to support yourself.” Mother didn’t argue with that, although she said that the only proper careers for women were schoolteacher, secretary, or nurse. When one of my cousins dropped out of college to marry, Grandma sobbed. “She won’t go back to school; she’ll just be a housewife. She’ll have children and do housework and depend on her husband to support her.” Mother tried to console her: “But that’s what she wants, to be a housewife and raise children.” “She’s too smart for that,” Grandma insisted. Grandma would be happy to know that, after her granddaughter’s children left home, she did go back to college, earn a couple of degrees, and work at a professional job.

Careers

Grandma said that she had had three careers before marrying Grandpa: seamstress, Western Union telegrapher, and schoolteacher. We saw her use skills from all of those careers.

Most of the sewing I saw her do was alterations and mending, although Mother assured me that she could make a girl’s or woman’s dress without a pattern, and that it would fit perfectly. That’s how she and her sisters got clothes when they were young. I don’t think that I ever saw Grandma using a sewing machine. She said she’d use a treadle machine, if Mother would get one for her, but she didn’t like the speed and whine of electric machines. She sewed quickly by hand, with evenly spaced, equally taut stitches. When she was finished, there was no indication that any change had been made to the mass-produced garment she had altered or mended, except that now it fit, or that it was no longer torn. My first sewing lesson from her was sewing on buttons. The first stitch or two went well; then the thread would tangle and knot, leaving long, unsightly loops on the wrong side of the fabric. “You put the wrong end of the thread through the needle,” she’d say. That made no sense to me; both cut ends of a piece of thread looked exactly the same. But she’d pull the thread so that what had been the short end was now long, tie it off to prevent pulling through the fabric, and set me back to work. The thread would stop tangling. The thread never tangled when she sewed on buttons.

Ramsey School where Dora taught in the early 1900s. Photo taken in 1969.

We found out that she knew Morse code when Dan decided to learn it for a Boy Scout Merit badge. He asked Mother to help him practice. Despite her best effort, she didn’t have the time it took to learn to produce and discriminate the patterns. When Grandma arrived, though, she said, “I can help with that.” She immediately started to tap out words and sentences. After some grumbling that “Girls aren’t supposed to know Morse code,” (with the exception of Mother, of course) and Grandma’s retort that Dan didn’t have to practice with her if he didn’t want to, he gave in and accepted her offer. She helped until he could use Morse code without error.

She told us that she had graduated from teachers’ college at the age of 16, after which she had taught school off and on. That’s how she had met Grandpa, teaching at the Ramsey school across the road from his farm. She took a fancy to him, she said, because he was kind and because he was rumored to be “French and Indian,” the best ethnicity she could hope to find in an area settled exclusively by European Caucasians. He was good-looking, too – as good-looking as one could expect of a Caucasian. A member of the school board, he would come over to inspect her classroom and her teaching. She grew to look forward to his visits, and one day he made his intentions known. He asked to kiss her. She ran, around and around the schoolroom. Why did you run? we asked. Because I couldn’t let him know I wanted him to kiss me, she answered. Why did he chase you, if he didn’t know you wanted to be kissed? we asked. Because he still wanted to kiss me, she said. How did he kiss you if you ran? we asked. “I ran just fast enough so he could catch me,” she said.

An Ounce of Prevention

Grandma had one skill that must have come in handy for teaching. She didn’t have to punish children, because she knew how to use an appropriate “ounce of prevention.” I only know of two of us whom she ever punished. One cousin told me that she was so obstreperous one day that Grandma spanked her. She was the only grandchild Grandma ever spanked. Her confession left me filled with shame, too humiliated and cowardly to make my own confession: I had done worse.

Part of Grandma’s “ounce of prevention” was always letting us know ahead of time exactly what she expected of us, and why. If she wanted help winding skeins of yarn into balls for knitting, she’d ask, “Who can hold this skein for me, so that I can wind it into a ball?” For most of us, helping Grandma was a great privilege. “I will, I will!” we’d chorus. Grandma would frown thoughtfully. “I don’t know…” she’d murmur. Then, with more energy, “Do you think that you can sit still for that long? I can’t have anybody who will drop the skein, because then it will tangle. Who can sit still longest?” We’d vie to convince her of our superior ability. Finally, she’d pick one of us, and the chosen one would carefully slide hands through the loops where the yarn doubled back on itself. Grandma would hunt for the loose end and, finding it, start to wind. I remember only once when anyone dropped the skein. Philip, the youngest and – at the time – the least inhibited, thought of something he had meant to do, dropped the yarn, and ran out of the room. The cat pounced on the now unsecured skein of yarn, and by the time we got it away from her, it took hours to disentangle and unknot the yarn. I got to help with that. I was chagrined that Philip was allowed to hold the skein again after only a day or so, when he had shown his thorough incompetence. But Grandma said, “He won’t do it again.” He did, but only a few times, and he was forgiven for those.

Anything that needed to be sprinkled could be sprinkled by a child. I sprinkled sugar and cinnamon on dough that had been rolled out for cinnamon rolls. (Grandma’s always turned out perfect, with just enough crust to be identifiable as homemade but not so much that they were tough; with just enough cinnamon to be flavorful, but not strong enough to mask the flavor of the yeasty roll dough; and with syrup that stayed syrupy without soaking into the bread or hardening to sugar.) I sprinkled flour onto the pastry cloth before she rolled out egg noodles, learning to make a thin, even layer that kept the noodles from sticking while leaving the dough tender and pliable. I even learned to sprinkle water evenly onto line-dried clothes so that they could be ironed.

As for everything, Grandma had a criterion for when children should begin to help around the house or farm. “Your mother takes care of you until you come up to her waist,” she said, “and then you take care of her.” Every time Grandma came to stay, she measured our height against Mother’s, so she’d know whether it was time to for us start taking care of her. Being tiny, I should have had a longer grace period than my brothers, but that didn’t seem to make a difference to Mother, because I started to help when I was two. I’d stand on a chair while she put the clothes through the wringer on the washer and catch them, so they didn’t wind around it instead of going into the clothes basket. Grandma, uncharacteristically, expressed her concern that my hand would go through the wringer – it happened, even to adults. I was afraid each time I had to do it, but Mother insisted that I was capable. Mother also had me stand on a chair and learn to iron, starting with handkerchiefs when I was about 4 or 5 years old. Grandma thought that was dangerous, too, and I did burn myself regularly, but Mother thought that doing the same chores would bring us close together. (That ended when Father put a basketball hoop on the garage for Dan and Mike; then Mother would sneak out to shoot hoops with them while I ironed.)

Before I learned to read, Grandma would read to me and Philip, but she told me, “I’ll read to you until you can read, and then you have to read to me.” She was delighted to arrive at our house in 1953 and find that I was starting to read. She’d sit beside me on the davenport (never called a couch or a sofa in our house) and help me sound out new words as I read to her. She quickly decided that, if I could read, I needed to learn to write, and she started to teach me. There was only one point of confusion. She taught me to make a lower-case “a” like the one there in quotation marks, with the stem curled back over the circle. Mother knew that the school taught Dan to make the letter in the “ball and stick” configuration. Once I understood that there were two correct ways to make it, I used the school’s way of writing an “a,” to Grandma’s chagrin. She was concerned that I wouldn’t recognize one when I saw it in a book, but she gave in to Mother’s argument that I already could. Although Grandma lost that onet she consistently encouraged me to “practice your handwriting,” so that people could read it. I wrote her many notes that said simply, “I love you, Grandma.” I don’t suppose she kept them long.

Speaking Her Mind

Grandma stated her opinions forthrightly, even (counter culturally for the day) in a conversation with a man. When Uncle Jerry, visiting us, proclaimed that man would never reach the moon, because the Bible says that “the earth belongs to man, but the heavens belong to God,” she demurred. Man would walk on the moon, she said, because the moon belongs to the earth. She was the only woman I knew who would contradict him publicly. She also contradicted him when he claimed that God had made dark-skinned people slaves when he cursed Ham. Although she couldn’t put her finger on it, she was sure he was wrong, and when one of her grandchildren pointed out that the curse was placed on Canaan, not on Ham or on his other children, she agreed heartily.

Grandma pestered Mother and Father to adopt a "colored" baby, so that she could have at least one good-looking child. Blond hair, blue eyes, and fair skin that allowed veins to show were the bane of humankind. Curly, kinky, or nappy hair was good; straight hair (“stringy,” she called it) was bad. Ugly veins didn’t show through dark skin. The only feature of white people that Grandma thought might be preferable was the nose, but she didn’t think that any nose was attractive. She said, “God only gave people noses to keep us humble.”

After Father lost that argument, he proposed that a "colored" grandchild wouldn’t be smart, and therefore would bring Grandma shame. Grandma took umbrage at that idea. Father cited test results showing that dark-skinned people are less intelligent. “It’s because they haven’t had a chance!” Grandma retorted. “They’re not allowed a good education. If they had as good an education as white people, they’d outdo us every time.” Father bristled. “They have schools.” “They can’t go to college,” Grandma insisted. “The ones who do are more capable than our college graduates.” Father pressed: “They don’t earn much money.” Grandma countered: “That’s because nobody will hire them.” Back and forth, back and forth they argued. Finally, she gave her summary statement: “The 'colored' are superior in every way. They are more intelligent, more talented, harder working, more honest, better looking, and more loving toward their families. All they need is a chance.” She got the last word. Later, we asked why she hadn’t married a Negro. “There weren’t any around,” she answered. “I had to take what I could get.” We wanted to know what she meant. “I married your grandfather because people said he was French and Indian. I figured that, in Minnesota, that was as close as I was going to get.” And Grandpa did love her and respect her. Mother said that he didn’t make a decision without consulting her, taking her on his lap and calling her “Baby Girl” as he laid out the situation.

In 1958, Grandpa Johnson received the Republican nomination for Governor of Arkansas. He accepted out of pride, but he didn’t want to be elected. So, he and Grandma Johnson left Arkansas at the beginning of September, just before election season started, to avoid campaigning. He brought his virulent racism with him. Negros, he said, are born with tails that fall off before they learn to walk. Negros, he said, aren’t fully human; they’re somewhere between apes and humans. If he were a Negro, he said, he wouldn’t want to live in a country where he was so poorly treated; he’d want to go back to Africa. The fact that Negroes wanted to live in the United States proved their lack of intelligence. Grandma Keillor, who was staying with us at the time, had looked forward to meeting the in-laws and to showing them hospitality. Hearing Grandpa Johnson’s defamation, though, was too much. When the paternal grandparents left for the lake cottage where they were going to stay, she exploded. “I will never talk to that horrid man again! Take me to Josephine’s!” Mother pointed out that the elder Johnsons were company, that they weren’t yet set up for housekeeping, and that they’d need her help for a couple of days. That meant she couldn’t take Grandma anywhere. “Then Aldridge will have to take me,” Grandma commanded. “It’s his doing that they’re here.” “Aldridge can’t take you,” Mother protested. “Yes he can,” Grandma insisted. “You can go on the bus tomorrow,” Mother offered. “I’m not staying here until tomorrow,” said Grandma. So Aldridge took her. As I recall, he came home from the office when there was a lull in business in late afternoon, came home to find Grandma packed, her luggage in the living room, and left immediately. Supper was just a little late that evening.

The incident was notable for Grandma’s character assessment. It was the only time I heard her evaluate anyone’s character negatively. She preached and lived by the precept, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”

Car trips in the summer were a rare occasion for conflict with us children. Living north of the Anoka Sand Plain thermocline as we did, we thought that 75 degrees was hot weather. The 4 of us would sit in the back seat, stewing in sunlight and sweat until we couldn’t bear it any longer; then we’d beg to open the windows. Grandma, sitting in the front passenger seat, would develop a pain between her shoulder blades. She’d bear it as long as she could, then ask for the windows to be closed. Most of the time we could find a way to open the windows just a crack, so that there’d be a little breeze in the back, but not enough for Grandma’s dowager’s hump to ache. If not, we’d stew, because Grandma wasn’t allowed to hurt.

A Cognitive Weakness

Car trips at any time of year gave us a chance to observe Grandma’s single cognitive weakness: a terrible sense of direction. As the curves in the road gave way to a straight stretch, Mother would ask Grandma, “Mother, which way are we going now?” If Grandma didn’t want to play the game, she’d say, “I don’t know about you, but I’m going straight ahead!” That would be the cue to desist. But more often, she’d either say, “I don’t know,” or, “I don’t have any idea what direction we’re going,” or give a wildly inaccurate bearing – “East,” when we were going southwest, or, “North,” when we were headed south to Trott Brook. That latter answer frustrated Mother. “You know that Anoka is south of Isle!” she’d object. “But the road turns,” Granma would respond.

Our direction relative to the position of the sun was no help, either. “Look where the sun is,” Mother would coach. “Yes,” Grandma would say. “The sun is on our left, and it’s almost noon,” Mother would continue. “What direction are we going when the sun is in the south, and it’s on our left?” “You can tell me we’re headed west,” Grandma would say,” but it doesn’t feel like west to me. It feels like north,” or “I don’t care where the sun is; it feels like we’re going north to me.

Grandma Dora

At her wits’ end one day, Mother asked, “You used to drive the horses wherever you wanted to go. You’d go into town, or visit people. How did you find your way then?” “I could get there by landmarks,” Grandma explained, “and if I got lost, the horses always knew the way home. I could just give them their heads, and they’d bring me back.” “Is that why you never drove the car into town?” Mother asked. “Yes,” said Grandma. “The car didn’t know the way home, and I couldn’t be sure of not getting lost, so I always had one of the boys drive me.”

Grandma went into town every week, on market day. According to one of the old-timers – Bertha Lennardtz, I think – everyone around Anoka rushed to get to Dora Keillor’s wagon before her wares were gone, because they could count on her eggs being fresh and her butter churned from milk that hadn’t soured. One advantage of having four daughters was that she had two old and strong enough to churn the cream, until they left home, and two younger ones to collect the eggs every day, no small chore with free-range hens. After the older two got jobs, the younger girls wore themselves out doing both chores.

Games and Riddles

Grandma wasn’t much for playing board games or card games. Occasionally, she’d humor me with a game of Chinese checkers, and she might have played checkers. You’d have to ask Dan about that; he was the checkers player. Grandma preferred the games of her era, tests of mental or manual dexterity. Rachel Diehl tells about her multiplying numbers in her head, large numbers, 3- and 4-digit numbers, and getting the right answers faster than the Davis children could check her on paper. (Mental arithmetic was a skill she valued highly; as soon as we learned an arithmetic function, she started to give us problems to solve in our head.) She played Cat’s Cradle with Mother or Aunt Elizabeth or, when her sister came to visit, Aunt Dell. Mother occasionally made a mistake and tangled the string; Aunt Elizabeth never did, and I think she knew two patterns. Grandma and Aunt Dell seemed to know all the patterns there were, and they’d change in the middle of a game, when one of them threw out the name of the new pattern. Their hands flew alternately, gracefully, beautifully, as the intricate weavings grew and waned. I was never good at that, or checkers, either. I had a hard time learning any procedure from rules; I needed to experiment, to try something and see what happened. Mother would interrupt with, “You made a mistake!” or, “That was dumb!” Grandma seemed to understand me intuitively. She’d ask, “Why don’t you move here and see what happens?” I’d move there, and see what happened, and learn.

Grandma also liked riddles, a game I didn’t understand until after she was gone. I don’t remember the specific ones she made up, but they were things like: What, if three, do we let be, But if it’s four, we search for more?

Or, from literature:

What stony item in a field, Can make the stony temper yield – And can, by a clean separation Achieve a peaceful unification?

Or, from life around us: What’s dead in summer, out of sight, Nowhere seen in autumn, either, In winter rises, all alight, But killed by springtime’s lovely weather.

(And, if a hint were needed): Men forsake their cozy homes Yonder on the ice to roam.

(And if more): In a shed, watching a pole, A fine dinner is the goal.

Grandma would have done far better in a tenth the time this took me. She claimed that she had made them all up on the spot rather than having remembered them from childhood. I’m still in awe of her fluency.

Although Grandma didn’t join us in our games, she would sit in the living room and knit gloves for each of her grandchildren or mend clothes while we played. If any conflict started, she didn’t try to sort it out for us. A firm “Children!” quieted us.

She rarely meddled in the way we were disciplined. One exception was her insistence that Dan, as the oldest son, had to be given authority over the rest of us. That was the oldest son’s role, and it was the only way a farm woman could have the time to do all of the work that was necessary. Her demand put Mother in a double bind. Father felt Dan’s elevation as his demotion. Dan felt it as a burden, yet its potential removal as an evidence of failure. Grandma wouldn’t back down. All of them blamed Mother for the consequences of the decision. Grandma claimed that Mother wasn’t treating Dan well enough; Father maintained that she wasn’t treating Dan harshly enough; and Dan blamed her for misunderstanding him. Mother was stuck in the middle, suffering the distress of disapproval from all sides and of increasing marital discord. (Grandma was fallible.)

Unaware of her contribution to the conflict, Grandma held Mother and Mother’s marriage together. In addition to the Daniel controversy, there was disagreement over Mother’s role as a wife. Mother had married Father with the expectation that, like the country doctors she knew, he would have her as his office nurse. He had grown up in the autocratic Southern patriarchy and was not going to have people think that he couldn’t support his wife without her help! She had grown up with a father who had consulted her mother about every important decision he made. He had grown up expecting that a wife’s role was to procreate, to raise the children, to keep house (if there weren’t servants) and to be a silent, or at least congenially bland, ornament when guests were present. Mother never could live up – or down, depending on one’s criteria – to his expectations, and he let her know it. She felt diminished and demeaned, and when she couldn’t get him to understand that, she would fall into deep depression. Grandma would tell her, “You can do the laundry,” and, “You can cook well,” and, “You love your children,” and, “Aldridge is a good husband. He gives you money to spend on the things you need, and he always comes home to you at night.” Mother depended on her affirmation.

“Never marry a doctor,” Grandma had told all of her girls. “He won’t be faithful, and he’ll leave you for another woman.” But she liked Father from the first time she met him. Mother, in an attempt to validate her dissatisfaction with her marriage (although she’d never admit such), asked her once why she liked Father, since she had such a dim view of doctors in general. “I like Aldridge,” Grandma said. “I always did.” “But you disagree with him on almost everything,” Mother objected. “Yes, but I still like him,” Grandma said, “and he’ll always be faithful to you.”

Suffering a Stroke

All of this was before Grandma’s first stroke in the fall of 1963. She recovered almost all of her abilities after that one, but she lost all sense of direction. She couldn’t even find her way to the bathroom, which was one step outside her bedroom door, on the left. She didn’t trust anyone to show her the way, except Mother, Father, and Dan. Once, when none of them was around, I tried to show her the way. She was standing in the tiny hallway, right beside the bathroom door. “Grandma, the bathroom is right here. Just turn this way,” I directed, taking her arm to turn her. She shook her arm loose from my grasp. “You don’t know!” she exclaimed. “Get Dan to show me!” She stood there, confused and angry, until he came into the house and showed her that she was nearly inside the bathroom door. After that stroke, she also had almost constant indigestion. “I have a sour stomach,” she’d say. “I need a lemon drop to settle my stomach.” I’d get her one; she’d accept that help from me. Based on current knowledge about women’s heart symptoms, I wouldn’t be surprised if her indigestion was from heart failure. She was so uncomfortable, physically and psychologically, those last months of her life that Ron and Joanne Ducommun, Philip, and I decided that it would be disloyal to cry when she died. But we grieved.