The Fairlands

My grandmother was an only child like me. For part of her childhood, she lived with her grandparents way up in the hills in a place the locals called The Fairlands. And, yes, it was so fair and so beautiful up there, with an incredible view to the north of high mountain peaks. It was a place of alternating stands of trees and green and golden meadows, of ponds and brambly berry patches and far flung farm houses and barns. She lived on her grandparents' farm. Her mother had left her there to go find work in other places.

The farm had a pond where they would fish and catch bull frogs for supper. Her grandparents came from solid Dutch, German, and French lineage, and they had a lot of kids. My Gram spent her days with an aunt who was very close to her own age. They walked several miles to a one room school. She told me when they went out berry picking in the hot sun, they would be careful to cover their arms with long sleeves and their heads with broad brimmed hats so that they would not get tan--because rich people had fine white skin, and only poor laborers got tanned. They did not want to look like poor laborers. When she outgrew the one room school, she went alone down into the valley to the nearest small town to attend the high school. But she was embarassed by her homemade country clothes and was afraid the town kids would laugh at her. So she quit school and worked instead. She always regretted quitting school. She was uneducated but she was certainly not stupid.

The story was always told that my grandmother's father was killed before she was born. But when I was doing geneaological research several years ago, I found no death records for the man whose last name my grandmother carried before she married, not at the time when she was a baby. None at all. I also found no marriage record for her mother and father. My grandmother was born in 1914.

The story my grandmother told me about her father's death, told to her by her mother, sounds made up to me now, but also apt. She said the man was walking back to be with them around the time she was born. He had been gone but he was coming back. As he came, he fell from a railroad bridge, and was impaled on a spike--right through the heart.

Sounds to me like a story an abandoned, embittered, unmarried mother might tell her child.

Anyway, like I said, my grandmother was an only child, just like me. Her mother married several times throughout her life, but she never had any more children. And when I was very young, 2 or so, my mother wanted to leave me with her and my grandfather while she went off with her new husband--the man in the wheelchair--in a white Oldsmobile covertible with red interior. My Gram said no. She said no because she had been left behind by her mother and subsequently felt like her mother never wanted her. (She often said she felt like no one really wanted her, and that she never really belonged anywhere. I have often felt exactly the same way. A family legacy, I suppose. She had depression too, another legacy.) And even though she was doing what she thought best for me, I would have been better off staying with her and my Grandpa and my aunt, who was 12 when I was born. It was Major Trauma for me to leave them. I loved them so much. They never yelled at me, or spoke to me unkindly, or beat me, or touched me inappropriately. They never ever thrust me into terrifying chaos. I also loved their old country house on a sloping hill with the ditch full of wild mint across the road. I loved the tall hollyhocks my Grandma grew and the Montmorency cherry tree and grape vines out back. She would can those tart pie cherries and keep them in jars in the cold cellar. I would eagerly follow her down the wooden steps into the cellar where the big wringer washer stood, and she would swing open the cold cellar door and get me a jar of cherries. I would eat them in a dish, red like lips and just as firm and delicious, in amber juice.

I loved the little succulent plants called hens-and-chickens that she had planted in her flower bed. I loved to smell the peony blossoms in June, and watch the way the ants helped the buds to open. The sweet, rosy scent of peonies still brings me straight back to that time of my childhood, and I remember how my Grandma and I would play around saying the word peony, saying pee-nee instead.

My Grandpa had built a picnic house down back, and it had a fireplace. I loved to play in there, I loved its screen door and the sound the door made when it swung shut, impelled by a big spring. My Grandpa had also built a large swing, the kind with two seats facing each other, and you could sit and talk and gently rock back and forth. He too had had to leave school early to go work. He came from a family of 10 kids, and had to help support the family. He was also very smart, and he read a lot. He taught me about continental drift and the whole Pangaea theory back in 1965, when he was sick in bed with cancer and I had climbed up beside him with the new globe I had been given. My family always told me that when I was a toddler and could not quite walk yet, he would hold my hands in his and walk me around and around and around. He was proud of his Dutch heritage and made a point of always eating Gouda cheese in the red wax. That cheese in wax fascinated me, I did not know anyone else who ate cheese that came in red wax, and could you eat this wax? (Not really.) He died when I was 8, so I only had a few years with him, but what good years they were. I still remember how he said 'winda' instead of window, and said the days of the week ending in the word 'dee' instead of day. My Aunt still talks that way. He also used to stand on the front porch afternoons and shoot starlings with bird shot while we waited for the school bus to bring home my aunt. He had rheumatoid arthritis really bad--another family legacy, and he was all crippled up by his late 40s. He got around on metal crutches, and he was only 59 when he died, from cancer.

I did not love the garter snakes that lived in the stone wall so much, they always scared the crap out of me. It seems like I would look down and-blah!--there one would be, all coiled in a spiral, or poking its head out from a shadowy space in the grey field stone. One morning when I was about 10, and was spending some time with my Gram, I went outside to the back garage, the one that had at one time been my Grandpa's wood working shop, to get something from the car, but was stopped in my tracks by the sight of a snake making its leisurely way in front of the garage door. I ran back in and told my Gram, and she got right up and went into the mud room and took a rake from the closet and went out there and coiled that snake up in the rake, and carried it across the road and shook it out into the ditch. She was so brave, my Grandma!

I also loved to tag along behind my teenaged aunt and her girlfriend from across the road. I loved the tiny cones that fell from the tall hemlocks lining the driveway. I loved the large lichen covered rocks beneath the red pines along the back fence line. I loved the big, tall chicken house next door, and the neighbors who kept those chickens. The Mrs. next door had a parrot! He sat on a big ring on her glassed-in front porch during the warm weather.

Early mornings when my teenage mother would sleep 'til noon, practically, I would let myself out of our apartment over the other garage--a mother-in-law apartment, as that kind of arrangement is sometimes called, and, in fact, my Grandpa did build it for his mother-in-law to live in. She had since moved on up the road a bit to live with her brother and sister-in-law, probably to make room for my recently widowed mother and me. I would walk across the grass in all weathers, barefoot in the dew in the summer, and across crusty frost in my feet pajamas in November, and go inside my grandparents' house. They were early risers like me, and we would all sit down to a breakfast of Thomas's English muffins. My Grandpa would drink Red Rose tea from a brown one-cup teapot, a pot I still use today, though I dropped the lid when I lived with the X and it shattered on the concrete floor (seems like lots of stuff shattered in my years with the X).

One morning, my Grandma had forgotten to unlock the back door, and so when I padded my way across the grass and climbed the back steps to the door leading to the mud room, a room panelled with real knotty pine boards, and with big closets filled with red and black checked hunting jackets and winter coats and snow shovels and rakes and a shot gun or two, though mostly the guns were kept behind the cellar door, I could not get in! I rattled and rattled that door knob, and then, undaunted, I made my stubborn little way over to the house next door, the house of the parrot. Mrs. Parrot let me in and I visited a bit with her before she took my hand and led me back to my grandparents' and knocked so loudly they had to hear and let me in. I myself never thought to knock. And my Grandma felt so bad she had forgotten to unlock the back door for me! She always said that, because this was one of our favorite stories to share, and we repeated it to ourselves and the rest of the family for years and years.

In later years, when my parents and I would come back from the disgusting city place we lived in to visit my grandparents (I always knew we were getting closer when I could spy mountains from my back seat perch in the white car), they would always set me up in a roll-away bed at the foot of their big bed. They had a beautiful heavy wool Hudson's Bay point blanket on their bed, a white one with 5 points and one broad red, yellow, black, and green stripe across the top. That blanket is on my bed now. I would lay there in my roll-away bed, in the chilly room, under lots of blankets, and I would look up in the dark and see neon colored snakes twining along in the space where the ceiling met the wall. I would sometimes awaken to witness large prehistoric fish swimming through the room. As an adult I read of how William Blake saw angels peeping through the leaves of trees and smiling at him when he was a child, and I would remember the snakes and the fish. And wonder just what the hell that was all about. But, I suppose, that is another story.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai