The Storyteller
My mother was a storyteller, although not in the way that most people think of storytellers. She wasn’t dramatic or prone to embellished descriptions. She was an observer and relished sharing her opinions on everything and everyone she saw. What’s the point of being an observer if you can’t share your observations?
As the wife of a dairy farmer, my mom did not have the opportunity to travel. Her observations came from the simple things that were part of her rural life. They began in childhood, and she frequently told us stories about her country school days in a one-room schoolhouse, the jobs she held before getting married, and the ordinary lives of three generations of family members that included her great aunts and uncles and her great grandparents on both sides of her family. You only needed to listen, and I was a listener.
People of The Silent Generation were savers of everything. Growing up on the heels of The Great Depression left an imprint on young lives, and being wasteful was apparently seen as a fast track to Hell. Her home was filled with evidence that she had no intention of ending up anywhere but Heaven. Cool Whip tubs, dime store wicker baskets, empty pickle jars, sewing notions – entire rooms filled with hundreds of things that in her eyes still had value and purpose. Her freezer was filled with dozens of identical bright yellow plastic containers that held anything and everything but the margarine that claimed you wouldn’t believe it’s not butter.
As my siblings and I have taken on the task of cleaning out her home, I’ve discovered a single truth. People who think it’s important to save egg cartons are the same people who leave behind three generations worth of family history randomly packed into enormous metal lard tubs. With the pop of every lid, the lives of ancestors come spilling out like puzzle pieces, the caveat being that none of the pieces belong to the same puzzle. I thought I had learned everything there was to know about our family, but clearly there will be more bleary-eyed, middle-of-the-night rendezvous with Ancestry.com. Newly discovered boxes of curled, black and white photographs flood my brain with questions, and the reality that I have lost my connection to the one person who could answer them stings more than I thought possible. I still have her stories, though, and they are anchored in my being like DNA. One story in particular has kept me wondering for decades, and I don’t think either of us could have ever imagined that the answer we thought had been lost to time had been right here in her house all along.
As the story goes, my Great Grandmother Effie had to be carried onto the train in Jackson, Michigan, kicking and screaming. She was in love with a young man named Charlie Kipp and she did not want to leave him. As a teenager in the late 1890s, moving 79 miles away from him had to feel like moving to the other side of the world. Hearing this story as a newly lovestruck teenager in the 1970s, I felt a deep kinship with her immediately. I was outraged over the injustice of it all, and knowing the entirety of her story seemed like the next best thing to a crystal ball as I gazed into my own future.
Effie eventually met and married my Great Grandfather and had seven children, but the story doesn’t end there. In 1941, she and Charlie both now widowed at ages 69 and 70 respectively, reconnected and married. They spent three years together at his Grass Lake home before Charlie passed away, but I’ve always wondered about the details of their reunion and which of them had contacted the other. My mother wasn’t sure.
A single photo found in the attic, or rather the back of the photo, had held the answer all this time. The photo is one of Effie standing next to her car in front of her Gratiot County home in 1941. His exact words, written in faded pencil, fill the back of the photograph:
Out in front of the bride’s home. I caught her just as she was leaving with the car and if I had of been a moment later I probably would of never seen her again.
So, it was him. Charlie had been the one who came looking for her. He wasted no time as is evidenced by death records of his late wife. She passed away in January and he and my Great Grandmother were married in April of the same year. His face in their wedding day photos is filled with so much joy. So is hers. I don’t believe either of them ever took this second chance at love for granted or saw it as anything short of Divine providence. There are no pictures of her daughter from that day, who was mortified about this late-in-life marriage that she saw as an embarrassment that bordered on the scandalous. I’m sure the article written in the local newspaper about their reunion and marriage only added fuel to the decorum fire. This was the sort of thing that was the subject of neighborhood whispering, and she knew the smoke would be smoldering in the background at every social event and club meeting for months to come.
As we sort through all of the things my mother accumulated during her lifetime, we are finding that there are few takers for aluminum pie pans, pressure cookers, and full sets of china and silverware. Millennials are more interested in collecting experiences than stuff, and Generation Z thinks all of these things are cool, but space is limited in the apartment they’ll be living in for the foreseeable future. All of us Baby Boomers are caught between the guilt we’ve inherited and the logistics of finding room in our basements for all the things that belonged to The Lost Generation and every generation that came after.
My mother knew exactly where all her plastic margarine tubs would eventually end up, but I know she hoped that the things she treasured would eventually find a place in one of her children’s homes. As I wrangle with decisions about what to keep, my heartstrings are clearly influenced by the stories she left behind. I’m slowly understanding that maybe her stories were more than just stories from her life. I think they were cleverly disguised insurance that her cherished possessions would not meet the same fate as the margarine tubs.
So fair warning, Millennials and GenZers. The stories are the gateway. They are the things that conjure up people and places from another time. They are the reason we answer with an enthusiastic yes when asked if we want a wooden rocking chair with our Great-Great-Grandmother’s name carved into the armrest. They are responsible for that unnamable force that keeps us up at night, pouring over documents from another century just to prove that our connections to the past are real, and that they exist like flesh and bone. Most importantly, in those moments of hardship when the world seems to be crumbling around us, they are the roadmap that tells us where we go from here.
