I Have Not Forgotten

'sub-zero temperatures and snow that could reach over a child’s head...They’d go on picnics or just lie in the grass and watch the clouds....eating the pickles as a treat all summer long...'

So far all of my posts have been pictures. I suppose that this is, in part, due to the fact that I am unsure of what to write and nervous about posting something for the entire world to see. But the fact is that I like to write. I make up stories all the time (though getting them completed seems to be a problem.) But I can’t very well post them here, not if I want to have anything published someday ;). But I thought that maybe I would post some of my old papers here.

This one is an Interview Essay I did for my College English class in the fall of ’08. I did it on my Grandma, she has many stories and some day I’d like to write down more of them. The first draft gave me a B-, I’m not sure what the revised version (this one) received. I made a few more changes before posting, mainly changing her name from the formal last name required for school, to the more comfortable (and anonymous) Grandma.

I Have Not Forgotten

Grandma Helen B. was born in 1924 and is the youngest of nine; she had four sisters and four brothers. Her dad died just after she turned eight. She has not forgotten the way it was back then.

“We had to share everything,” said Grandma. Her life was harder than most because for the greater part of her life she didn’t have a dad working or even looking for a job. Her mother, like many others during the Depression, turned their upstairs into a boardinghouse and the yard into a garden. Her brothers and sisters helped out as much as they could; the older ones quit school and went to work. Being the youngest, Grandma got a lot of help from her siblings: one of her sisters would make clothes for her, her brothers would pitch in to buy her a coat when she needed it, and of course there were always hand-me-downs.

Grandma grew up in South Saint Paul, Minnesota, where at the time when she was growing up, winter meant sub-zero temperatures and snow that could reach over a child’s head. “It was cold,” says Grandma: sometimes she used her coat as an extra blanket and when it was really cold she’d wake up it would be frozen to the wall. Her mother closed off the rooms that they didn’t use because she couldn’t afford to heat them. There were times, Grandma told me, when cars had to pull far out into the street to see around the piles of snow; they were too high to see over.  

Grandma talked about how one sister who owned a grocery store where she’d (the sister) let people open charge accounts, “They weren’t thousand dollar charge accounts like they have now,” said Grandma. It cost five cents to buy a loaf of bread, but a lot of people didn’t even have enough for that. “Some of those people never could pay,” said Grandma, thinking of the people to whom her sister had given credit. Her sister lost a lot of money from those accounts; I wonder if she knew that so many would never be able to pay?

Grandma told me that there was a farmer they knew who couldn’t always sell everything he’d brought in to town so he would often give the leftovers to her mother, friends like that helped a lot. Many people had to go to soup kitchens, places that charity organizations, like churches, had set up to give out free soup, bread, or groceries to those who needed it the most. Those who could afford it would often donate food items or money to support the kitchens.     

If her mother couldn’t pay the bills, someone might come out and turn off the power or water. If the lights went out, “we’d just haul the candles out,” Grandma said with a smile.

           Grandma’s dad taught her how to write on the flat boards he brought home for the fire: “I made either straight lines or circles,” she said: Grandma could write her name almost perfectly by the time she started school.        

Grandma and her friends found many ways to have fun that didn’t cost them much more then the time they had to spend. They loved to skate, winter or summer, ice skating in the winter and in the summer roller skates were the thing. They’d go on picnics or just lie in the grass and watch the clouds. Or sometimes they’d play baseball with the boys for a change. Sometimes Grandma’s brothers, and their friends would play a game in which they’d all hunt for treasure, they’d have her hide the jar of dry corn that served as the treasure so they could all look for it together. They all played jacks, cards and other games that sometimes used a lot of imagination, like pretending old corn was money or treasure.

Grandma remembers her mother keeping a barrel of brine all summer and as the cucumbers got ripe her mother’d throw them in the barrel to pickle. Grandma recalls the neighbor kids, as well as her own siblings, eating the pickles as a treat all summer long.

Grandma learned a lot from growing up during the Depression, and what she learned to this day affects the way she lives. When she had a garden she canned food as her mother did, and now that her children are grown she teaches her grandkids to write the way her dad taught her, with sticks and circles. She saves plastic bags even bread bags, and uses everything until it wears out. She clips coupons and watches the ads for specials. She hates to let food go to waste. Grandma would never buy something she didn’t really need on credit, for she knows too well what can happen: before the Depression a lot of people bought things on credit and took out loans or mortgages on everything they owned often to invest in the stock market, and when the stock market fell some people lost everything, and if they couldn’t pay back the money they borrowed they could be evicted from their homes, and many were. Why, after all these years does she still live the way she does? Grandma told me, “I have not forgotten what it was like.” And there is much to be remembered.