Sweet Pea Grandmother

A hundred years ago, my grandfather brought his wife Irene and their five little children to their new home. It’s the very house I live in today. My father was the littlest boy at the time, and all his life he remembered the delight of dangling his feet over the side of the unfinished basement and “fishing.” He didn’t catch anything in the standing rain water, but he did grow up with a love of this place and a love of his family that he passed on to me.

Seventy descendants of that couple gathered here at the house on Memorial Day weekend on a fresh and glorious spring day.

We celebrated the house and my grandfather’s skill at sturdy concrete block construction. A team of horses had waited by the cypress trees along the Warwick River as he brought up carts of clean river sand that had collected on the shore behind an abandoned vessel called the Daniel Boone.From that sand he made the blocks, and from nearby forest trees he made the lumber.

I admire my grandfather—he was a Renaissance man with many gifts in art and enterprise.

But this week I was after a glimpse of the grandmother I never knew, the loving and hospitable women who raised ten children and then died just as her grandchildren began to come into the world. Who was she?

I knew she was beautiful. Here is Irene to the left of her favorite cousin Mae.

I knew she invited every stray family home for Sunday dinner even if she had to set the table three times. The bowl below is overflowing with Lisa’s snaps and campanulas. In Grandma’s time, it was always filled with dessert and topped with fluffy farm whipped cream.

I knew her culinary skill. On diary pages, Irene’s sister Elsie regularly wrote such news as: “Irene baked three elderberry pies.” “Irene made cream puffs.” “Irene made dried apple and raisin pies for the barn raising next day.”

And I knew she was a gardener. After all, every spring I still smelled the sweet fragrance of the lily of the valley she had planted in the “outdoor living room” I had heard so much about.

In planning for our hundred-year celebration, some old papers came to light. I found a few lines written by Aunt Pauline. In these words, I finally gota glimpse into my grandmother’s heart:

“In later years she had health problems and would have to spend weeks in bed. She loved flowers and as soon as she could get out she was back in her flowers and garden. After she was gone, I put on one of her old garden coats to go outside and in the pocket was an empty sweet pea package. She always planted sweet peas early on the back yard fence and they had beautiful blossoms.”

Sweet peas. And so, this fall, or early next spring, I will plant sweet peas here in my garden. In honor of the grandmother I never met.