My Grandmother's House

     I loved my Grandma McCrary’s big old Victorian house in Iowa. I visited there as a teen and liked hiking in the fields with my Grandma to check on the quarter horses. They foaled in the spring and we had to make sure the newborn foals were all right. One summer she let me name one of them and I told her to name it “Van,” who was a boy I liked back home. Of course I didn’t tell her that, just that I liked the name.

     My family usually stayed for a week or so, often with other aunts and cousins. The house only had one bathroom and we kids slept upstairs. Grandma introduced us to chamber pots wish I thought were disgusting. Even though I had to go down the stairs and to the back of the house to use the toilet, in the middle of the night, I would rather do that than empty the smelly chamber pot in the morning.

     My Grandma baked her own bread, even grinding the wheat AND she milked her cow and made cheese. She introduced me to those domestic arts as well as how to kill a chicken, slop hogs and gather eggs. When the tornado siren sounded we trundled down the rickety basement steps and sat on old blankets while we listened to the transistor radio. I would gaze at the shining quart jars of beets, pickles and applesauce. My mother was NOTHING like my grandmother so I was fascinated by my Grandma’s skills.

     Grandma had an old blind mare named “Sandy” who had a patient soul. I proudly rode her down to the town arena on Wednesday nights and looked at all the real farm kids race their horses around barrels while I stayed on Sandy, thinking how cool I was. One summer, the night before we flew home to Texas, old Sandy stepped on my foot and wouldn’t move. By the time my brothers pushed her off my foot it was black and blue and swollen. The next day I had to wear my white Sunday shoe unbuckled and my foot hurt like heck for days.

     The Town Library was just down the street in the enclosed porch of two old ladies, whose names I have forgotten. It was only open a couple of times a week so I would trek down the sidewalk and choose new books. The old ladies said, “Oh, you’re Marion’s granddaughter from Texas,” and I would smile, thinking how nice they knew who I belonged to. Then I would haul my books up the hill and spend hours reading in the hammock.

     Early summer mornings I walked across the street to the neighbors and picked strawberries for ten cents a quart. It was hot sweaty buggy work, but gave me spending money. Later I walked past the “library” to downtown Bonaparte. There was a “five and dime” store full of treasures and soda pop and candy.  

     While I have fond memories of my Grandma’s old Victorian house, she did not. At the time she lived there, she was Grandma Flake. My Grandma Flake died of a heart attack in the downstairs bedroom, leaving her with a mountain of debt. I later learned from an Aunt that he was abusive and mean. He owned farms in several states and her job was to take care of this one, while he was gone for weeks at a time.

     Grandma was left with a mountain of debt, a dozen horses and lots of farm animals. She slowly sold off the animals and rented the cornfields to someone else to farm. In time, she met my Grandpa McCrary down at the feed store. He was an old bachelor, as first wife and baby died at childbirth. They married and moved to his family farm across the river. Grandma sold her farm to a family who assumed her debts, and started a most happy life with Keith. She later wrote in her journals that her few years married to him were the happiest of her life. They were only married six years when he died of a heart attack. Grandma died five years later.

     So when I look at this photograph of her old Victorian farmhouse being built and I remember the long lazy summer days I spent there, knowing I was her favorite grandchild, I am pained to now know that to my grandmother it must have been a prison, with its own kind of hell. What to me was a place of great delight, was a place of darkness and burden.

     Yet my Grandma made the best of it. She gardened and canned, planted luscious flowers, was beloved of her neighbors and friends and welcomed her daughters and grandchildren. My Grandma McCrary left me a legacy of making her small part of the world a better place. I am so much more like her than my own mother. She died when I was a young mother, only twenty-four and many times I have wished for her wise counsel and loving arms.

Marion Josephine Stewart Smith Flake McCrary - My Grandma