Grandma Mary
A few years ago I wrote a story about Grandma Rapljenovic, my vision of what I thought it must have been like for her. The pictures confirm my story.
Great Grandma Mary left her home in the mountains when she was 15 and she never returned. She wasn’t running away from home when she walked down the hill from her village carrying the small suitcase with all her belongings. She was running to hope and possibility.
Her village was gorgeous in the summer and fall. The fields were planted with wheat and other grains. The hillsides were trimmed a close deep green by the grazing of cows, sheep and goats. The forests were deep and dark places to rest from the heat. Window boxes in each home burst with the brilliant color of red geraniums that were saved from year to year. Cuttings were passed on as wedding gifts so that the blessings of a long productive marriage would carry from generation to generation.
Mary knew everyone and everyone knew her. When she took a comfortable walk to her aunts home, the women in the fields, babushkas on their heads, skirts pulled up above their knees, huge rough hands, would stop their digging or cutting and chat. They always asked whom she was going to marry, if her grandfather had gotten better now that the weather was warmer, if she had heard from her brother in the war and they asked about her roses. The woman knew the answers before they even asked the questions, but they always asked. And as she walked past them she heard them clucking their tongues as they shook their heads in pity for her mother. They thought she was a dreamer, a lazy girl who took walks in the work hours, spent too much time planting and pruning her roses and not enough time tending the cleaning of the barn.
The home where Mary lived with her mother, father, grandfather and brother was not the nicest in the village. It sat on the slope of a hill that was reached by climbing a twisty turning path from the creek bed. The animals lived in the bottom part of the building and the family above them on the second floor. The warmth from the animals helped to keep the family warm in the winter, but of course they also shared their noises and their smells. The house had a cooking room, sitting room and sleeping room. The peč cook stove, fueled by the branches collected in the forest, cooked the food in the cooking room and warmed the entire home even on the hottest summer day from the tile box in the sitting room. The sounds of the milk cow, the plow oxen, the goats, chickens and geese entertained the family night and day drifting up through the cracks in the floor. There was never quiet in this house.
A fence was built around the winter pasture to keep the animals from wandering off the hillside and into the village gardens. Mary planted climbing roses there one spring. She hoped that the glowing brilliant red of the flowers and the deep green of the leaves would hide the ragged rough fence, but day after day the buds were ripped off and the new shoots chewed with delight by the goats. So the roses had a place of their very own along the side of the house. The slope was too steep for anything to grow there and the rocks from the foundation had been left to collect weeds. Each summer beginning at age 12 Mary cleared the rocks away shaping little spaces just the size needed for a rose bush.
Mary got cuttings from the older women. Roses were only grown by the widows who lived in the homes of their children, the bent over gray haired ladies dressed eternally in the black of their loss, who could no longer work in the fields. The wrinkled useless women who were dependent on everyone for everything shaped the beauty of the village. They nurtured the geraniums through the harsh mountain winters keeping them safe from freezing. They picked the wildflowers from the groves of trees to place on the table as a moment of beauty. And they grew the roses.
All around the village roses in a yard was the sign that a grandma widow lived there. If grandpa was still alive then grandma didn’t have time to tend the roses; she had to tend grandpa. But if grandma out lived her husband she was left with only time to cure her loneliness. The other grandma widows would bring cuttings of their most precious plants to the funeral so that the new widow would have something to care for. She would gather the cuttings in a basket and the day after he was buried she could be found on her hands and knees digging a home for her new charges, and everyone knew she would outlive her sadness.
Even when Mary was very little she liked to talk to the grandma widows. She would kneel down beside them in the dirt intently watching them scrape and scratch the soil, trim the brambles back and pluck the bugs that suck the life out of their flowers. She listened deeply to their stories and when she went home she left them feeling less old.
One spring she asked for a cutting. What could it hurt the widow thought, one little cutting to bring some color to the life of this child on the hill. So the widow took a fresh shoot from the velvety red rose and gave it to Mary. Mary took this small thorny woody piece and tenderly stuck it in a clear spot next to the barn. She wrapped the base of the shoot in composted manure and straw and covered it with a glass jar. Each day she tended her new rose by taking off the jar dripping with water drops to let in the fresh morning air and sunshine, and then replaced the jar again as a protection from the evening breeze. She watched and talked to the plant waiting for a response day after day. She never tired of pampering her shoot even when her grandpa told her that she would never get that stick to flower. And then one day a nub of green appeared and she knew that her shoot had begun to root and the next summer she would have her very own roses.
Mary went one day after another to each of the grandma widows asking for a cutting of their most precious flower. Each one thought that it could cause no harm to give beauty to the child that brought them youth, so by the end of spring the sloped wall of the house and barn looked like someone had planted a crop of glass jars.
It wasn’t until the grandma widows were sitting at the same wedding table in the fall that they realized that Mary had changed the path of tradition. She was growing roses for their aesthetic beauty, the joy they brought her, the delight in watching each new shoot come to life. She was using productive time and energy to nurture roses rather than care for the garden. Mary was spending hours with flowers and her family may not have enough vegetables stored for the long winter months. Her family could go hungry because of these roses. The fear was deep in their eyes and the crevices of their faces. Mary must return to the beans, tomatoes, potatoes, cabbages, her summer days must be struggling with the garden weeds and varmints. There was no time in youth for beauty; there was only time for survival, preparing for the cold, guaranteeing that no one would starve in February and March.
They shunned Mary when she came to talk. Their fear for her put the age back on their faces. They told her to stop being foolish, to grow up, to take responsibility for her family. They stopped telling her stories and found no time to listen to hers.
As she grew older they tried their skills at matchmaking. If they found Mary a good husband she would stop this foolishness with the roses. She would be so occupied making her husband thick coffee, cabbage rolls and bread, bearing his children, pampering his home that the roses would be forgotten until he was gone. Then when she became a grandma widow she could return to beauty.
It wasn’t that Mary didn’t want to get married; there just was no one in the village she wanted to marry. Most of the village inhabitants were her relatives. Her family had never left this hillside. They were born here and grew ancient in the home that housed the same life pattern for generation and generation. Her uncle broke this tradition and left when she was 8. She remembered him as tall, big boned and hugely restless. He was always wondering what lay beyond the mountains, what you could see under the lights of the city and how much of a fortune he could make someplace other than this mountaintop. He left for America one spring before the war and before the fields were planted. He and Mary’s grandfather fought late into the night about his leaving and the fact that he didn’t care enough to plant and harvest the crops. Uncle said that if he waited for the time when there was no work to be done he would take his boat ride across the sea in a pine box. The next morning he was gone. He left a flower on the table for Mary’s mama, a coin for her dad, his pocketknife for her brother, his pocket watch for his father and a picture post card of Cleveland for Mary.
No one talked about Uncle after he left. They lived their lives as if he had never lived his. He wrote a letter to them a couple times a year. The letter sat on the table for days, no one opening it; everyone touching it when they thought no one was looking, no one asking to read it; everyone lingering around the table after dinner waiting; but not asking. Finally Mary’s mama would say, “Mary read Uncle’s letter and get it off my table.” Her grandfather would humph himself to his chair, light his pipe, but he didn’t start his normal rocking cadence; he didn’t want to make any sound that would cover Mary’s reading.
Mary read of the giant lake that seemed as big as the ocean, the rows and rows and rows of streets and houses, the neighborhood where everyone spoke Croatian, the bakery where he could buy a slice of home and eat it on the way to work. He wrote of his job in the steel mill with men from Croatia, but also Poles, Hungarians, Russians, and Irish. He told of the money he was saving so that he could own his own home, the corner bar where he sang familiar songs with the other men tears streaming down their homesick faces. Uncle knew that Mary would read the letter so he always added a postscript at the bottom, “Come to Cleveland little kitten and I will find you a rich husband.” Mary never read that line to her family; she just stopped her reading at “I miss you all, love Stanko.”
Mary did not want to marry a cousin; a boy that she had played with all her life. She didn’t want to marry the butcher who had lost his wife leaving him with 4 little children and no help in the shop. She didn’t want to marry the peddler’s son who was always sticky from the last sweet thing he ate. She knew what she didn’t want, but she had no idea what she wanted.
Mary watched her friends leave their homes and marry the boy at the bottom or the top of the hill. Elsie married a war friend of her brothers and moved to the valley, but most of the young women were just shifting locations, not making changes in their lives, not finding love or adventure, but maintaining the sameness. After the entire village celebrated the coupling Mary would wander home early. She tired of the old men tipsy on slivovitz wrapping their arms around her and breathing blessings for her marriage on plum breath. Her step was heavy with sadness, not for herself, but for her friends who were turning into their mothers and grandmothers before her eyes.
Mary’s 15th winter was the coldest her grandfather could remember. The snow piled so deep that they couldn’t get the barn door open. They cut a hole in the floor of the main room and dropped the food and water to the animals from the house. Every washday Mary would strap on the snowshoes and carry the basket of dirty clothes down through the drifts to the creek. She had to break the layer of ice on the creek with a rock so that she could reach the running water under the ice. Each week the ice got thicker and thicker and harder and harder to break. She would kneel on the snow-covered ice, wash the clothes scrubbing between the forming ice crystals and rinse them before a film of ice formed on the creek. When she finished the washing she stumbled up the hill carrying the soaking clothes to the fence by the barn. There she unrolled the frozen garments stretching out their stiffness and hung them over the fence to dry. If there was no sun for days the clothes hung crisp like a frozen scarecrow until the air finally dried them. After Mary completed this weekly chore the clothes on her own body crunched and cracked when she moved, ice crystals formed on her eyelashes, frozen droplets hung from her eyebrows and the stray hair falling from her babushka. When she went to warm herself by the stove her melting clothes formed a pool of creek water under her boots and a chill deep to her marrow.
Mary decided to leave the day after Uncle’s winter letter came. For a week the letter waited to be read as if everyone knew that this single piece of paper would change their lives for eternity.
Uncle had gotten married and bought a house. His bride Katja was from a village a days ride from Mary’s home. She spoke strong English and Croatian. She had gone to an American school and spoke with almost no foreign twist to her words. They bought their home in the Croatian neighborhood just down the street from the bakery where Katja worked. Stanko had stopped in this sweet smelling haven every afternoon on his way to his job. He would buy a slice of potica, a piece of strudel, and Italian pitzel or a Hungarian kifli. Sometimes Katja would put an extra American cookie or chocolate brownie in the bag because his innocent smile warmed her soul. Their meetings became such an important part of each of their days that soon the casual contact was not enough. Katja would ask for her afternoon break when she saw him coming so that when he walked through the door his hat in his hand she had his treat ready. They would walk across to the park, sit on a bench while he ate the warm goodies and share their own stories of home and hope.
On the day when Stanko knew he had enough money to buy the house down the street he asked Katja to be his bride. They sat so long on the bench imaging their future that they almost lost their jobs. From this moment on their talks were overflowing with plans. The house was purchased in the late summer and the wedding, held at St. Stephens Church, on a gloriously warm day circled with cool breezes over the lake. Their wedding night was spent in the freshly new double bed in their perfect newlywed cottage dreaming of the songs of children in the halls.
Stanko wrote of his beautiful wife and the home where they sat each evening on the front porch talking with the neighbors. He also wrote that in his house he could turn on a faucet on the wall and water would come out. One faucet had water as cold as the creek at the bottom of the hill and the other had water has hot as the teakettle on the stove. He told about the tub in the basement that, when filled with water, washed the clothes for Katja. Attached to this machine were two wooden rollers that would wring out the clothes so that when Katja hung them on the line they were almost dry. They had a line outside to catch the sweet Lake Erie breezes in his pockets, but also a line in the basement when the weather was cold.
Mary could not believe what Stanko wrote. She read it over and over again. Water ran out to the walls of Stanko’s new home. Katja didn’t have to carry buckets or break ice. Her hands were not raspy, raw, hurting when the cold split the skin. She had a machine that squeezed the water out of the wet heavy clothes.
By the time Stanko wrote of his happiness Katja was expecting their first American child. This child would read the Cleveland Plain Dealer to his father, answer the phone in pure unbroken English and play baseball with the passion of a natural born fan of the Cleveland Indians. Stanko’s happiness dripped off the pages, and when Mary read “Come to Cleveland little kitten and help us care for our precious baby” she knew that tomorrow she would go.
She shivered in her sleep that night fighting the forces of guilt and hope, sameness and adventure. She woke before dawn packed the little cardboard suitcase, left a note saying that she was going to Cleveland and walked down the twisty turning path to America.
Great grandma Mary lived until she was 90. She died behind her little house in Cleveland bent over her rose bushes. The east wall of her house was lined with roses, each one different than the next. There were sweet little miniature roses and huge droopy flowers. Each one started under a glass jar and lived protected from the winds of Lake Erie. Great grandma worked every morning in the warm sun scratching and scraping the soil with the same tool she had been using for over 70 years. She folded compost made from kitchen scraps tenderly around the roots, tapping them solid with her hands and humming the same modal tune over and over again.
I never heard Great grandma sing to anyone but her roses. Most of the time she would hustle and bustle around the kitchen shifting hot boiling pots and heavy pans of meat. Every time we came to her house, whether we were hungry or not, we sat crowded around the dining room table prepared to eat enough food to feed the whole city of Cleveland. No one was allowed to help her in the kitchen. She would say, “No, No get out of my way. Go sit. I bring food to you.”
Even after living in Cleveland for 75 years her English was difficult to understand. When all the family was gathered in her house and the cooking and cleaning was done she would sit heavy on a straight back wooden chair, her hands crossed her belly watching the words fly around the room. She always seemed to be listening to a foreign language, working too hard to understand, catching the laughter from the smiles not from the words.
Great grandma never went back to Croatia. She would scoff and say that she couldn’t go back to the old country because the fresh mountain air would kill her. She never saw her parents or her brother again. She wrote letters a couple times a year, but as the years moved on she became more and more of a stranger to them. They couldn’t imagine the miracle of her life in America. They would never understand that she couldn’t keep a milk cow on her postage stamp yard lined with cement driveways. They would never understand that she left her children curled deep in sleep every night, rode the bus into the dusty dark bowels of the city to clean the floors and the bathrooms of people she would never see. They would never understand that she bought her bread in a plastic bag, and the tomatoes, green beans and peas came in cans. Here in America life was easier, she didn’t have to work so desperately hard for everything. There was time in the day for leisure, time in the morning sun to tend her roses.
She bought her first rose bush in America at the grocery store. There in the produce section in front of the parsley, rutabagas and turnips was a small table with a dozen starter bushes. Each package had a girl’s name and a picture of a different colored bloom at its climax. She picked up each package turned it around and over. She drove her fingernail into the woody stem smelling if the scent was freshly turned earth or rotten leaves. She stood in front of these shriveled thorny branches inspecting each plant ignoring the other shoppers pushing past her until she chose the perfect plant to take home. She bought the rosebush instead of soap that day. She would ration the soap, use those little left over pieces for one more week so that they could have pink flowers behind the house.
Great grandpa didn’t want to dig up the grass for a flower. His tiny back yard was trimmed and pampered. He pushed the rotary mower back and forth, side-to-side and end-to-end on his miniature piece of land between the driveways. He crawled on his knees with his behind up in the air snipping the edges, and then he sat in his folding chair in the shade of the garage admiring his perfect American lawn.
Great grandpa had no idea of the significance of this pink rose bush named Baby Betsy McCall. His wife never mentioned flowers before. She was practical with her time and their money. She was nothing like those Italians who lived down the street and had red flowers dripping out of every window, lining the driveway and choking the foundation of the house. He never expected this stoic woman who shared his bed, made his tea the way he liked it with 2 squeezed lemons and a cup of sugar to care so passionately about a rose bush.
When he told her no he would not dig a hole in his lawn for a stupid flower, she stood in the kitchen clutching the shriveled plant to her breast. She didn’t say a word. She just stood there staring through him to the other side of the world. Then before she turned to go out side she quietly said between clenched teeth, “I do it myself.”
She had never defied him before. She submitted with silence to his tempers, his drinking too much with the men from the railroad and his strong fisted running of the house. She cooked the meals from the old country that he liked. She scrubbed the floors of the house weekly on her hands and knees. She washed the walls, turned the mattresses, beat the blankets and pillows in the sun each spring. She listened passively to his stories of work and his dreams of making it rich so he could go back to Croatia and show his friends and family how successful he was. There were days when she almost said nothing to him at all.
When she turned away from him and went outside he followed her to the shed yelling in Croatian for the entire neighborhood to hear. She never said a word. She crossed the yard and took the shovel to a sunny spot beneath the kitchen window. Between his curses and screams she began digging a circle in the grass just big enough for her rose. Great grandpa tried to wrestle the shovel out of her hands, but she spread her legs, locked her knees, set her hips and told him to leave her alone.
“All I do is work! Day after day the same - cooking, cleaning up after you - the children - those people downtown. I ask nothing from you. I am going to have a little beauty in my life with or without you!”
Never before had he heard her speak with this tone of passion. It was as if there was a vision behind her eyes that she needed to fulfill. She needed to be able to step back from her life remember who she was and know that her choices were good. After that when he heard that intensity in her voice he stepped out of her path and let her do what she needed to do.
The Betsy McCall rose was the first of a fashion show of summer beauties.
When Grandma Mary became a grandma widow she went to the flower shop and bought an American Pillar climbing red rose. She trained it to wander along the brick façade so that everyone riding past the house could see that an American Grandma widow lived there.
