My Kid and her Girl Cousin have just run in the front door with their dolls;
“They’re spraying a house and the lawn of the church. We had to run all the way to get away from the bad smell! We held our breath!” They are perhaps a little too aware of environmental toxins.
They’ve had a swimming lesson and Grandpa made pancakes. The Boy Cousin has disappeared for a play date of his own. The girls are getting their dolls ready to go to the library with Grandma. They are dressing them in old baby clothes. Girl Cousin said she has two baskets full and is letting My Kid borrow whatever she needs for her doll while we are here.
Now the girls are looking at their respective mothers wedding dresses. In one closet easily accessible are my wedding dress, my sister-in-law’s wedding dress, my mother’s wedding dress and the wedding dress of my grandmother on my father’s side. I saw it today for the first time. Brown and fluttery, silk lace with velvet flowers sewn to the back. She and my grandfather were married Wednesday September 9, 1931– according to the local paper at the time:
The bride was a charming pic-
ture in her dress of golden brown
silk lace with hat and shoes to
match. She wore a crystal neck-
lace and carried an arm bouquet of
bride’s roses and baby breath.
(the) brides-
maid, wore a becoming dress of
brown silk crepe trimmed in coral
with hat and shoes of correspond-
ing hue. she wore a coral neck-
lace and carried a bouquet of ophe-
lia roses. The groom was attend-
ed by…
A wedding breakfast and wed-
ding dinner were served at the
farm home of the bride’s parents,
the thirty guests being relatives of
the bride and groom and the mem-
bers of the bridal party. Roses,
arranged in vases, featured the
decorations in the home.
Both…
born and raised in Colfax county
and they represent two well-known
and prominent rural families. Mrs.
Paternal Grandmother
was graduated from the
Schuyler high school with the class
of 1929 and for the past two years
taught in the rural schools of Col-
fax county. She possesses a
charming personality and her
many friends greatly favor her as
a young lady with but few peers.
Mr. Paternal Grandfather
is one of our most ex-
empllary and highly respected
young men. He ranks with our
progressive and industrious young
farmers and his numerous friends
hold him in the highest regard.
After a motor trip to western
points, Mr. and Mrs.
Paternal Grand-parents will
make their home on a farm in Wil-
son precinct.
The description of my grandparents wedding is amazing to me. The other day I read an essay by someone commenting on the extreme weddings that show up on TV and in the wedding sections of newspapers. Modern weddings are bigger but the commitment is smaller. The big weddings that celebrate the marriages that ultimately end in divorce turn out to have been nothing more than a theatrical productions. The author wrote about small solemn weddings in a church or at the home of the bride’s parents were taken much more seriously and everyone in attendance knew it.
This clipping is probably the only newspaper article written about my grandmother. She is identified as a young woman of some taste and education who has just given up teaching to take up the role of farm wife and respected member of the community for the next 50 years. The few momentous acts that set in motion the rest of her life are so different from the tangled ball of seemingly random experiences strung together to form my 20’s and the young adult years of most of my friends.
I am stunned by photograph of this same grandmother as a little girl in her First Communion dress looking more calm and confident than I ever saw her as the worried farm wife who had lived through the depression after the deaths of her only sister and both parents.
”I’ve never seen this picture before“
”Oh I tried to show them to you last year but you were too busy“
I don’t remember looking at pictures last summer, but I don’t remember saying I didn’t have time to look at pictures last year. I know I was running around town on my own a bit more than other visits what with The Husband there, friends’ wedding to go to and a search for an animal skin to use in Clown Axioms.
The girls looking at the wedding dresses led to photos. As I looked at the photos and before I was done more would be handed to me. I started to copy down the description of grandma’s dress other pictures would be shown and I couldn’t even get through newspaper clipping description of the bride and bridesmaid’s dresses because of all the other pictures to look at right then as they were taken out of the box and displayed.
The place the photos took me too in my head was wrong for that busy room of bouncing children and talking parents.
The picture of my grandmother in her first communion dress is amazing and I could have stared at it for hours.
Sometimes when I have come home for a visit (especially the first couple of times after the move to New York) I felt stunned almost to paralysis by the overwhelming waves of memories of my own from grade school, high school and college and raising my child in New York City instead of a place like Missoula. One year when I arrived I realized I had not processed my grandmothers death the previous autumn because I hadn’t been able to go to the funeral and so from my Brooklyn apartment it felt as though she was still in Nebraska where I couldn’t see her anyway and her death hit me at that moment, a shock I alone felt, amidst a hail of chatter about items from her house and photos from my childhood and conversation about what shall we give the children for their next meal.
A wave of queasiness washed through me.
This trip doesn’t feel that way. This trip is just an ordinary summer visit home. Perhaps because we spent a week in Seattle first, I’m already used to Western attitudes and natural neutral comfortable clothing. Other years arriving sprawling Montana town to do sit and do nothing on a day that began fighting the crowds at JFK can be quite a shock. When we said good bye to The Husband at the airport in Seattle he regretted not having the time this year to come to visit Missoula where we are forced to adjust to a slower pace. (Well physically anyway–the mind still spins.)
The there is so much power in that one picture of my grandmother in her first communion dress. The child in that picture is absolutely centered. She knows who she is and where she stands in the world. It’s a photograph of a strong child. Then, I imagine, her world fell apart around her. Her teenaged sister died and my grandmother-to-be finished her sister’s school teaching contract. Her mother died, but she kept going; farming with her husband and raising her children and chickens and tending to the apple orchard, vegetable garden, flower garden, kitchen, washhouse and root cellar, sewing, baking, cooking for the family and the hired hands, washing, gardening and worrying. A woman who worried constantly was the grandmother I knew.