The Joys of Being a Woman and Other Papers | ||
XVI
A Little girl and Her Grandmother
I am always sorry for children who have never known what it is to have a grandmother and a grandfather and an old mountain farm to visit, far away from everywhere. A little girl I once knew had all three. Her grandmother was the dearest grandmother I have ever seen. She was tall and stout, with a broad, comfortable lap, and her hands, as they stroked the little girl's head on her shoulder, were smooth and soft. The grandmother's eyes were blue and full of mischief and fun and love. When she laughed she shook all over so that nobody looking at her could help laughing too; even the little girl, who was naturally serious. The grandmother's checks were a soft pink, and her hair was black, faintly silvered. She wore it parted plain on week-days, but on Sundays it was crimped. On Sundays, too, she wore her black grenadine, but on other days her dress was blue gingham with a long white apron.
The grandmother lived on a farm so steep
All through her childhood the little girl used to make long visits at the farm. She was a queer little girl, not at all happy. Her grandmother said she was "high-strung," but her mother and the little girl herself called it just plain "naughty." At any rate, she was always losing her temper, and then crying for hours over the sin of it. She worried over everything that happened by day, and she was afraid of everything that might happen by night, and was always flying from her bed in terror of the dark. At last, when the little girl's cheeks would grow so thin, and her eyes so big and anxious that her mother was at her wits' end what to do with her, she would say to the father: "We must send Margie down to mother."
Now the little girl's father, who was a minister, had very little money, and the grandmother had less, but somehow they would do without things and do without things until they got the little girl safely off to the old farm, where she grew so brown and fat and jolly that her mother hardly knew her.
The first of these visits was when Margie
Another visit came the summer when Margie was seven. Her father was going to Convocation, and so could take her with him and drop her off at the grandmother's station. Margie wore a big sailor hat and a brand-new sailor suit. She was so excited all the way that she did not talk at all, and would not touch her lunch. At last, peering out of the window, she saw the old spring wagon and her grandfather holding the reins and her grandmother waiting on the platform. Her grandmother lifted her up in her arms, doll and satchel and lunch-box and all, and carried her over to the wagon: at home Margie was much too old to be lifted and carried. Seated between her grandparents, while her grandmother held her hat and the mountain wind blew through her curls and her trunk bumped along at the back, all Margie's worries fell away from her—she forgot she was a sinful child, she ceased to think that the babies were doomed to drown in the river, that her mother would be stricken by dread disease and die, that her father would be run over in crossing the railroad track; and as for springing from her bed in fear, that night and all the rest she slept so soundly that she never woke at all.
Arrived at the farmhouse, the grandmother
After supper, while the light was still clear, her grandmother would undress her and put on her nightgown: then, when her hair was combed and her teeth brushed and her prayers said, she would wrap the little girl in the gray blanket shawl, and carry her out to the big rocking-chair on the front porch. There the grandmother would croon old songs while the little girl's head drowsed against her shoulder, and the summer twilight stole upon them. Sometimes the call of a whip-poor-will would sound out from the woods, or the roosting turkeys in the apple trees across the
As the little girl grew older she could not go to the farm so often, partly because she took a full-fare ticket now, and partly because her mother needed her at home but always, when she did go, she and her grandmother had the same old good times together, and Margie was still happier there on the old mountain farm than anywhere else in the world. She seemed to love her grandmother better now that she was old enough to think about her more. The grandmother had some funny ways. For one thing she would never sit in a straight chair at table, but always in a rocker. She would eat a little, and then sit back and rock a little, and sometimes, since meals at the farm were leisurely and chatty, she would fall asleep while she rocked, but she would never admit that she had napped a minute, not she. Try as you might, you could never get the grandmother a present that she would keep. She loved dainty things, but the prettier the gift, the more she would fall to thinking how much it would please some one else, and so presently away it went. If the giver chanced to find her out, she would hang her
After a while the little girl was quite grown up and had gone to college, where she had acquired a bad habit of studying herself sick. Once again her mother in desperation sent her to her grandmother. At the station the grandparents had the spring wagon waiting with a cot bed; they laid the little girl on it and
But there came a last visit. They found that for two years the grandmother had been ill with a terrible disease, but she had kept it a secret as long as she could. They sent her little girl to her for the last time. The grandmother would always stop moaning when Margie came near, and sometimes she would rouse herself enough to sit up and tell her stories. She, liked to lie in the hammock and have Margie swing her gently, and she would often send her down to the ferny spring for a fresh drink of water. She liked to take it from the old cocoanut drinking-cup, and almost always as she handed this back to Margie she would say, "Have you ever tasted such good water as this?" and always she was pleased when Margie answered, "No."
One day Margie had to go away to her teaching. Her grandmother got up from her couch and walked to the front door to bid her good-bye. They said very little, and they did not cry at all, only as Margie looked back from the turn of the road at the little farmhouse and the valley and the circling mountains, at all the place she loved best in all the world, she knew that she should never wish to see it again.
So the little girl's visits to her grandmother came to an end, like a beautiful book read through. But though it is never the same as the first time, one may read a book over again. The little girl has been grown up for a long time, but sometimes when she is tired and worried and frightened she turns back the pages of her memory. She is sitting on her grandmother's lap on the porch in the summer twilight. Her grandmother is singing to her, and the great moon is rising behind the clematis.
The Joys of Being a Woman and Other Papers | ||