They say we’re to expect a storm later today with gale-force winds by evening. Yesterday, though, it was bright and crisp – a good day for working outside. I worked on winterizing; Nyel prepared a bed for planting bulbs. I wondered briefly, as I was cutting back the dried stalks of Shasta daisies and he was thinking about daffodils, if that was a metaphor for our personalities: I looking back; Nyel planning ahead. Not a bad combination…
I was also thinking a bit about my mom’s birthday which is coming up on the thirteenth. She would have been 101 had she lived four years longer. Curious about what was going on in Oysterville in the days before her birth, I looked in Dear Medora and found this entry for November 11, 1911:
Dear Mama,
I received your letter today.
The snow gets deeper every minute. It hasn’t drifted a bit. It is about 2 1/2 inches thick. George K. hitched Charlie to Mr. Kistemaker’s sled and we rode up and down the plank walk and when George went back to the ranch to put Charlie up I hauled the children (Sue, Mona and Gladys) up and down the street. I haven’t snow balled all day.
Willard can really, truly crawl. He can say “bath,” “by by,” “Papa,” “Mama,” and tries to say “bottle.” He was eleven months old today. Willard wears that stocking leg, knit waist length leggins and that new sweater and that bear skin coat. He loves the music rack.
Mr. Kistemaker has fixed the stalls in the barn across the street and put the colts and Dolly in there and he has the other horses in the big barn at the ranch. He gave the cows turnips.
I can’t bring sand from the beach until the snow stops.
Medora was twelve and was here in Oysterville. My grandmother (who was thirty-three) was in Olympia awaiting the birth of her seventh child who turned out to be my mother. Both my mother and Willard were born in our State Capitol because of the proximity of doctors (unlike Oysterville) and because my grandfather was in the Senate and so they lived there part-time in those years.
There are several references in Medora’s letter worth noting. The first, of course, is her commentary on the weather. I do remember once about forty years ago when it snowed over Thanksgiving vacation but ususally these days we expect rainstorms not snowstorms. Global Warming and Climate Change for sure – which is underscored by references to the horses (Charlie, for one, and Dolly), It would be a number of years before automobiles and carbon emissions outnumbered horses and fresh fertilizer here in Oysterville.
The other reference which is interesting to me is about bringing sand from the beach. The beach refers to the bayshore in front of Oysterville which, in my mother’s childhood (and partly in mine, too) was a wide, sandy swath. Nowadays of course, it is a saltwater marsh, all a-tangle with pickleweed and salt grass.
Mama had asked Medora in a previous letter to take the wheelbarrow to the beach and get clean sand to put in the woodshed so that the little children would have an ‘outside’ play area during the winter. The window above the kitchen sink looked out into the woodshed so she could keep an eye on their activities. Smart woman – definitely one who looked ahead, at least as far as the seasons went.
How lucky you are, Sydney, that your family kept letters that give a window into the past and how lucky you are to still be tilling the flower beds and caring for the house.