Today the Church celebrates “All Saints.”
I am not thinking of the big ones. I am thinking of my forebears. As the first child of a first child of a first child, I was born in time to know all my great-grand parents.
Most of them were hard-scrabble pioneers in southeast Oklahoma. All of Anglo-Saxon-Prussian descent except for one Choctaw. Some of them were already “old” when I got to know them. Actually, they were all younger than I am now. Most of them lived very long lives on a diet of bacon grease and cornbread. Very hard work was the only exercise they got.
I learned a lot from each one of them just watching. I saw incredibly hard workers. Only one can I remember ever spoke about her religious beliefs. My maternal great-grandmother would ask, “Are you saved.” I have no idea where she got that. We were historically all open-minded Methodists in that branch of the family. I asked mother. She said to ask Ma-Ma. When I did, Ma-Ma said, “From the fires of hell.” Terrified, I went back to Mother with that one. Her answer to everything was always to be a good little girl or later to always be a lady. Not sure about that advice, but today I certainly do not have worries about the afterlife, one way or another.
On the other side of the family, I remember my paternal grandparents. We spend a lot of time at their house. By trade, Grandaddy was a postman for many years, but he also grew or raised everything his family needed, a cow, chickens, vegetables. And Grandmother was a wonderful cook. She could go out back and wring a chicken’s neck and fry it up for Sunday dinner. She preserved every vegetable Grandaddy brought in. I do not have a pleasant memory of canned vegetables, but I remember her hot rolls and flaky pie crusts with joy.
An interesting factoid about Grandaddy and Grandmother: they attended different churches. They tithed, 5% to each church. And if you were visiting them for the weekend, you went to church on Sunday mornings and no work or entertainment was permitted. Actually, this always seemed a bit phony to me. When we got home from church, Grandmother magically put an amazing Sunday dinner on the table. Afterward, all the women and girls washed up while the men usually fell asleep in their chair in the living room reading the papers, but we could not hang the wet dish towels outdoors on Sunday. What would the neighbors think?
Like Grandaddy, my own Daddy could fix almost everything. These days I joke that if were to go looking for a husband, I would walk through the aisles of Home Depot. Truth is, I can fix almost anything myself. And Mother could sew anything. I can do that. My dearest possession is her sewing machine.
These are my saints. “For all the saints who from their labors rest.”