Ode to a one-woman manufacturing plant.
A personal essay, 2.20.24 (reposted from Medium)
In 1955, the year indoor plumbing came to Bugg Street, no chicken in Lynnville, Tennessee was safe from Gamma. She could have any bird wrung, plucked, washed, and cut up before you could say, “Pass the cornbread, Daddy.”
Some years ago, to my surprise, I learned that my paternal grandmother had cleaned a grand total of 102 hens that year, all of them starting life (and ending it) in a weathered old coop in the backyard, adjacent to the smokehouse and garden.
Along with the phone bill, three credit card solicitations, and a little shampoo sample, I found a plain white 8” x 10” envelope in my stack of mail. Inside, I discovered a precious time capsule: a copy of my grandmother’s 1955 diary, Xeroxed and sent to me by my dear Aunt Jean.
To a writer slightly obsessed with his Tennessee roots, this was like unearthing the Ark of the Southern Covenant.
I turned off the TV, put up my feet, and began to comb through my grandmother’s squiggly, backhanded cursive.
Gamma wrote in her 1955 diary every day. But just a few select words describing the daily doings and goings-on of a woman who had raised eight depression-era children and provided domestic comforts for Rabern, my grandfather. The retired dairyman who swept the house every morning (whether it needed it or not) while whistling Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing before putting in his false teeth. This gave the revered old hymn a slight “airy” timbre, which I listened to as a boy from underneath multiple layers of tattered quilts on frigid Tennessee mornings.
Mostly, my grandmother kept track of the basics in her diary: the weather, how much she washed, ironed, sewed, cooked, and who visited. As I passed over her sentences, I kept waiting for the existential angst of her life to emerge, the primal scream, burdensome regrets, or the “Why me, God?” exclamations so common among privately kept thoughts. The only real tragedy in 1955 occurred on Friday, May 27th, delivered in Gamma’s bone-dry, schoolmarm prose: “I altered some toreadors for Lois. Mr. Lovell hanged himself in his barn. Baked a chocolate cake.”
I finally gave up on finding some deep, underlying meaning in Gamma’s diary and saw it for what it truly was — a one-year production inventory of a one-woman manufacturing plant.
That’s when I started counting chickens, and much more:
The Garden, 65 ¾ gallons — In the summer of 1955, Gamma canned or froze 34 quarts of cucumber pickles, 141 pints of jelly and preserves, 65 quarts of beans, 32 quarts of tomato juice, 37 quarts of whole tomatoes, 14 quarts of greens, five pints of corn relish, 13 pints of pimentos and six pints of chili sauce. She also planted zinnias, petunias, chrysanthemums, cannas, roses, the blooms of which framed the front porch of my grandparents’ humble clapboard farmhouse during the growing season. Gamma didn’t have a green thumb. She had a green soul.
Cakes, 34 — Gamma “cooked” pineapple, chocolate, angel food, coconut, and many others. She also made biscuits, pies, candy divinity, and cookies by the barrel. I noticed she did most of her baking toward the end of every week. She knew the children and grandchildren would be arriving on the weekends. Any sugary morsel under the wax paper usually didn’t see Sunday night. On the rare occasions that it did, my grandfather always managed to scarf up whatever crumbs were left behind.
Dresses, 21 — The Singer sewing machine sang in 1955. There were the Davy Crockett dresses for Carole Anne and Linda Beth. A blouse for Jean, a skirt for Mary Sue. A white linen collar for Zo. And those toreador pants for Lois. My grandmother made tatting, pillow tops, repaired damaged overcoats, and closed up sock holes. Anything that required a stitch, Gamma could find one in time.
Amazingly, Gamma squeezed in other activities.
She attended Sunday school and church 43 times, hosted a Tupperware party on the coldest day of the year, wrote numerous letters and cards, had one chest x-ray, “stayed down” with a cold twice, took possession of the household’s first television, celebrated the arrival of her new Maytag washer machine and double sink, and attended two movies, The Bridges of Toko Ri and A Man Named Peter.
After the third reading of my grandmother’s diary, it finally struck me—that one revelation I kept looking for under those humbly wrought words, the one thing that would define her life as she lived it. I suppose it should have been obvious to me from the first word. Maybe the intervening years had blinded my memory of the meaning of her existence. Her words brought it all back, however. Gamma’s sole purpose on earth became as plain as the blush on her Jergen’s lotion cheeks: almost everything she did, she did for the benefit of others.
In the years following 1955, I don’t need a diary to recall the events of my grandmother’s life. I was born a year later and had the privilege of spending many happy moments in her presence. The continuing diary of Eula Leigh Booth Adkins is all vividly pictured in my head and heart, as clear and bright as a Giles County sunrise. Her gentle touch, the sound of the frigid linoleum sticking and unsticking under nagging bunions as she rolled out the biscuit dough, the cackling cuckoo clock, and the joyous expression on her face when her little tow-headed grandson would scoot himself up to the oilcloth wearing thin socks and sleepy eyes.
If Gamma knew the contents of her diary had been revealed for public consumption today, long after she had gone over the Jordan, I know how she might react. After wiping her gnarled, arthritic knuckles on her apron — that gingham flag of industriousness she raised at 5 a.m. every morning of her life — Gamma would say, “Oh pshaw!”
***
Love this!!
I like the sound of Gamma. A hard working, no-nonsense kind of woman. Another beautifully descriptive piece of writing, Mark. Isn’t it amazing the power of words can have? I bet when you were reading the diary, you felt as though Gamma was right there with you. I hope all is well.