INIMITABLY MYRT

When I think of my grandmother—my mother’s mother—I always remember her hands. What I usually remember in people are their faces, their eyes, their bodies and how they move them. But with my grandmother—whose name was Myrtle Weber (née Cavinder), but whom we called Grandma Myrt—what comes to mind first are her hands. They were small but very strong from hard work and agile from her crafts. They had their share of “battle scars”, since in those days, a life as the spouse of a tenant farmer, which she had been for many years before moving to town, was tough on hands and I never saw her wear a pair of gloves (except to go to church). But the skin was, nonetheless, translucent, freckled and blue-veined. Her hands were dry but smooth to the touch—unlike my mother’s hands, which took after her father’s, and became coarse as sandpaper if she forgot to use gloves for any sort of manual labor. I too inherited those abrasive, split-thumbed farmer’s hands, not Grandma Myrt’s gentle but work-resilient ones.

Myrt at her house in town

When my brother and I were kids, however, what fascinated us the most was the middle finger of one of her hands which had a pronounced crook in the middle knuckle, so that if she tried to lay it flat on the table, that middle knuckle remained hooved up like a pup tent in the middle of her hand. My little brother Dennis James—whom we called Jim—was a loving, if irascible, and extroverted little boy and would sit with Grandma at the big linoleum-topped table in her kitchen and cover that hand with both of his. He would ask if that knuckle hurt, to which she would shake her head and smile, and then he would try his darnedest to “straighten it”—to no avail, because it was permanently and definitively crooked. Its immobile state clearly set little Jimmy’s nerves on edge.

It wasn’t arthritis, which, to my knowledge, she never suffered. My mother, Reba Mae, said that it had been scarlet fever. Reba Mae was old enough at the time to recall how ill her young mother had been when she was infected. Grandma Myrt had been delirious with fever and then it seemed as if the entire viral load had settled in her hand. “All night long,” said Reba Mae, “she either paced or rocked in a rocking chair, holding that hand against her chest with the other one and mumbling about an old Chinaman.”

The fever also left her with an apparently temporary heart problem, which, with country medicine being what it was back then, in the nineteen-thirties, no one had detected. One day, when she was thirty-six and Reba Mae was thirteen, seemingly out of the blue—although god only knows what superhuman exertion she had undertaken just prior—Myrt began having severe pain in her chest and abdomen. The tenant farms in that area of west-central Ohio didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing yet at that time, but they did have telephones—the type in a wooden box with a ringer crank on the side, an earphone on a cable and a mouthpiece on the box that you spoke into. So my Grandpa Vern had my mother ring for the doctor, while he began applying hot compresses to Grandma’s chest.

They didn’t help. In fact, she seemed to grow worse. And when the doctor finally arrived, he was aghast. “Jesus Christ, man!” he exclaimed. “What are you trying to do, kill her? She’s having pectoral angina. Go get some ice out of the horse trough!”

On the farm with her chickens 

Between the medic and Grandpa, it’s a mystery to me how Grandma Myrt made it through that heart attack, but I never heard of her having heart trouble after that. Although if she had, you would never have known about it, unless it were so severe that she was lying dead on the floor.

Out on the farm, work had occupied the days from pre-dawn to dusk. Vern had taken care of livestock herding and breeding, land cultivation, firewood and upkeep of buildings and fences, and Myrt had taken care of the house, their four children, the milking, the chickens and the garden. During harvest season, she fed not only her own family but also whatever men were helping out temporarily with picking and thrashing and scything and baling. In the spring there was the garden to spade and hoe and vegetables to plant. In the summer there were fresh veggies to be picked and weeded and cared for, and in the fall, there was plenty of pickling and canning to do.

She sold eggs all year round to supplement their income, and she learned to drive their Model T Ford so that she could drive herself to market in town. I remember Reba Mae telling me that sometimes when Grandma was crank-starting the cantankerous Model T, it would backfire, jerking the crank out of Myrt’s hands and smacking her over the wrist with it.

Vern on a tractor that he built

The rigors of old-time farm life had imposed an unbending schedule on her and Grandpa Vern and they maintained it when they moved to town and he took charge as caretaker and superintendent at the local cemetery. Grandma Myrt was up every day before five, had breakfast on the table for Grandpa at a quarter to six so he could make it to work by seven, had lunch on the table at eleven-twenty, so he could be back to work by twelve, and then had supper on the table at four-twenty when he arrived back home for the evening. In between, there was baking to do one day, washing and ironing another, cleaning still another and sewing and darning whenever needed.

She seldom if ever wore a dress that she didn’t make herself. She had a Singer sewing machine. The only sewing machine she ever had. It was a mechanical, treadle-operated Singer built on an oak sewing table. Myrt was proficient in its use, and I used to love to sit and watch her stitch together pieces of clothing cut from patterns that she purchased at J.C. Penney’s, pumping the Singer’s treadle with her feet while deftly feeding the material through under the bobbing needle and thread.

This task was made even more fascinating to watch because it was where my morbid curiosity attracted me to observe the calves of her legs as they rocked the pedal back and forth, seeing how the terrible varicose veins that she had bulged through the thick stockings she always wore to provide them with support. My grandmother had, I think, about the worst varicose veins that I’ve seen in my entire life—big blue, clustered knots of veins that looked like they might burst at any moment. And yet, I don’t think I ever heard Grandma complain about them, although they must have often caused her severe pain.

Easter, Darla, 7, at Grandma's house

My sister Darla loved to watch everything Grandma did as well. Right from the beginning, Darla understood how admirable Myrt was and took her strength, sense of humor, fearlessness, intolerance for moaning and tolerance for hard work—and humming while you did it— as the way women were meant to be. As Myrt’s granddaughter she had little time for sissies and touch-me-nots and her friends would tend to be the same kind of smart, game, independent and resilient girls and women that she was.  

In the evening, so as not to leave her hands idle for the Devil’s work, Grandma Myrt would sit in an armchair—the arms and headrest decorated with delicate lace doilies that she had crafted—and either embroider or crochet. The things she made were delicate and beautiful, and it was amazing to watch those hands that did so many hard chores during the day still have the agility and craft to turn out such beautiful things at night. And while she worked, she sat with, first one leg and then the other, stretched straight out in the air, as if the foot were resting on a hassock. But there was no hassock. The leg just remained like that, steady as a rock in the air, as if on a transparent footstool. I can only guess that it must have been to relieve the pain that her varicose veins almost surely caused her.  

Grandma Myrt also made her own lye soap to wash the clothes with. She didn’t have a newfangled spin-dry washer. There was a tub with an agitator and a wringer that had once worked with a crank, but which Vern had converted to electric. She once accidentally ran one of her hands through it. Not knowing how to get loose, she reversed the direction and ran her crushed hand back out again.  She didn’t want any sympathy. She said if she’d been paying attention she wouldn’t have gotten hurt.

This was typical. She certainly wouldn’t have gotten any sympathy from Vern. I remember one Saturday when she fell rushing out to our car to accompany my mother somewhere. It was icy and she slipped. As we piled out of the car to help her up off of the sidewalk, Vern stuck his head out of the back door and growled, “Stop wallowing around on the ground and get the hell up before the neighbors see you, Myrt!”

As we helped her to her feet, Grandma just laughed and said, “I’m fine, I’m fine. Don’t fuss. I’m not hurt...just clumsy.”

My mother’s younger brother Ken would repeat this same kind of behavior with his wife when he was teaching her to drive. Hazel, his wife, was doing a great job of piloting their car down a country road at twenty or thirty miles an hour. But at some point she grew distracted, bit the berm with her tires, lost control and ended up in the ditch. Flustered and crying, she turned to Ken in the passenger’s seat and said, “What do I do?! What do I do?!” To which Ken answered, “Well first, let’s get the hell outa here before anybody recognizes us!”

Unlike Grandpa Vern, Grandma Myrt had an excellent education for a woman of her time. She had been a good student, like Reba Mae after her, and her own mother and father had made sure that she graduated from high school before she married. She wrote, also like my mother, with a careful cursive hand and she loved to read—the newspaper and magazines if nothing else, since books were too expensive to own many.

Vern, on the other hand, had only gone to country school for a total of three years. It was when his sister was very young and his mother made him accompany the little girl to the schoolhouse, because she had to cross a woods to get there, and even though bears had almost been hunted to extinction in most of Ohio by that time, Vern’s father had occasionally spotted black bears in that woodlot. When Vern got big enough to labor in the fields, however, he had to stay behind and work, and his sister had to fend for herself.

But Myrt supplemented her husband’s education and helped him learn to read and write fluently. Enough so that he did the paperwork at the cemetery where he was superintendent. And he kept up his literacy by reading dimestore cowboy novels, which he loved and which Myrt would buy with a little of her egg money to encourage him.

She was a wonderful grandma, who was strict but loving. She hugged us and kissed us and spoiled us with the wonderful cakes, pies, cookies and puddings she made. She read us fairytales and babysat with us when our parents were away. And when we were older and left town for college or the military, she sent us “care packages” full of her goodies and tracked our itineraries on the maps of an old geography book that she always kept handy.

Me at 4 with Grandma

Grandma was a twentieth century woman—born in nineteen hundred and died in nineteen seventy-eight. When she passed away, it was after a tragic time in which my grandfather, who had always been such a strong and able man, succumbed slowly to dementia and increasing physical incapacity. Myrt, who had always been so optimistic, so unshakable, so ready to face and take full advantage of each day, was devastated. Never a complaint about the hard life of a farmer’s wife or the relative penury of their life in town, Grandma Myrt had always considered herself fortunate and was grateful for each and every thing she and her family had. But without Vern, her life suddenly seemed to have become meaningless.

She wrote me a letter shortly before her death in which, for the first time ever, she told me how much she lamented each day. She said she was lost, that Vern had always been such a strong and practical man who “could do just about anything.” She signed it, “Your broken-hearted Grandma Myrt.”

Myrt and Vern in their kitchen

It wasn’t long afterward that my mother’s older brother found her dead in her home. One of the terrible clusters of varicose veins in her leg had ruptured. Gene, Reba Mae’s brother, said that is seemed obvious that Grandma had tried to “clean up the mess she was making,” but had passed out from blood-loss and bled out while unconscious.

Now it was our turn to all be devastated. Grandma Myrt was a pillar, a guiding light for all of us. And suddenly, just like that, she was gone.        

Reba Mae told me that, shortly after Grandma Myrt’s death, she came to one of my cousins, who was very close to her, in a dream. My cousin had been inconsolable since Grandma’s death. Now, in the dream, Grandma Myrt told her, “Don’t be sad, honey. It was real easy.”

Fact is, she made everything look that way.