birthday — 2014 — The 21st Century Matriarch

My maternal grandfather was born in the very early years of the 1900s. He died many years ago but I am thinking of him today because his birthday is tomorrow.

He was the most daunting of my grandparents because he was quite tall and could look rather fierce. I think when I was very young I steered clear of him….until I got to know him a little better the first time I stayed with that set of grandparents without the rest of my family. From then on I realized that he was a big instigator of ‘fun’ for the grandchildren, in particular during the summer.

He was always on the lookout for rivers or lakes for swimming. Eventually his built a swimming pool.
He built things too - a fountain and wishing well, a picnic table around a tree, a huge grilling pit, bricked benches and planters, a merry go round (wielded together) and a very tall swing with fat rope/large seat. For years there were new things that had been built every time we visited.
The house was not air conditioned so sleeping outside in the summer time was the most comfortable. One summer he has a flatbed trailer pulled up behind the house; it became our raised platform for sleeping under the stars (we had to scurry in with all our bedding one night when it started to rain!).
He had a big garden and involved all the children in picking and processing produce. I remember his tutorial on how to pick blackberries and not get caught up in the thorns. We shucked corn on the cob (that went into the biggest post I’d ever seen, so big it required two burners on the stove). Of course there were flowers too - in the part of the garden closest to the road.
He did quite a bit of the cooking too. His main seasoning for just about everything was pepper rather than salt.
There were chickens but the peacocks he raised were the attention getters. Just before I got old enough that I didn’t visit as frequently, there was a summer that he had an incubator; hatched peacocks and ducklings. What a learning experience that was for the grandchildren!

My paternal grandfather was the oldest of my grandparents and he was the first to die. It happened over 35 year ago. I was still in college - old enough to have clear memories. I find myself comparing him to myself:

He was more gregarious than me;
He made an effort to be fair to everyone and he passed along that emphasis to me;
He took care of household things so that they lasted 'forever'; I still have his hedge trimmers with his repair and marvel at the other things I have around the house that are 40+ years old because I care for tools in the same way;
Both of us only had one child and we were in our 30s when that child was born.

I look on the Internet Archive for books published around the time he was born and realize how much the world changed over the course of his lifetime. When he was growing up, farming was done with horses…then tractors. The farm houses had no electricity or plumbing but that too changed. He moved to town in 1950s because of drought that reduced the profitability of farming. He picked up odd jobs to supplement his savings. He was a quick study and a savvy one at ‘networking’ although he would have never called it that.

He was ahead of his time in another important way too: he bought me wooden blocks in a little wagon when I was very young. At the time, most people probably gave dolls to their little girls. He did construction projects with boards and nails in the garage with all my sisters too. He gave us the opportunity to enjoy activities that were not typically done with little girls and, by that example, showed us that our horizons were not limited by gender. Each of my grandparents probably contributed to that foundation, but from a different perspective and at different times of my growing up. My paternal grandfather was the first - when he gave me wooden blocks rather than a doll.