More About My Family

Tonight, for Grandparents’ Day, my sister and I went to visit my grandma. We were both tired from our long weekend (so excited that my sister and I practically spent the entire weekend together!) but we wanted to at least drop by. I’m quickly realizing that my grandma’s life is… like a ticking time bomb, and while she may not pass anytime soon (hopefully) we can never be too certain.

So besides the cancer that is going on, she fell the other day and broke a vertebrae. They want to do surgery, but grandma is basically against it. She’s got too much going on in her body and doesn’t know how well that would end. So she’s just dealing with the pain and management of all her health as best she can.

But what astonished me tonight more than anything was that we spent about 90 minutes at grandma’s, just talking about the past. I forget how we even got started, so I’m just going to list some things that we discussed. Hopefully I’ll remember more or find out more from her later.

1. Grandma is mad at the local newspaper. She only gets it on Tuesday and Sundays, but today when she got the news, she noticed that none of the Football Friday events were listed. She told me she’s been having trouble reading through a Nora Roberts book for the past month or so. She’s been trying to use the newspaper and sports stats as entertainment while she cannot seem to focus on her reading. —- A side note here, I have never known my grandma to not have a book beside her that she flies through pretty quickly. Even when she and grandpa were still much more active, I remember her loving to read just like I do.— In any case, I ended up looking up the results of so many different sports games; Penn State, the local leagues, etc. She even tried to watch my kids’ game which was broadcast on TV the other night; she found that one boring to watch too.
2. My sister tried hogmaw the other day from a lady at her work. She didn’t know what hogmaw was (neither did I), so grandma started to explain about it. Grandma calls it piggy maw, for the record. This was basically a meal that grandma liked, but hated to cook. She said it took the entire day and was extremely tiresome. You see, when the family butchered pigs, they set aside an entire day. My great grandparents on pappy’s side of the family all got together to do about 20 pigs. They started before breakfast, my great grandma would make pancakes (grandma says she was the best cook she ever met!), and then butchering would occur throughout the day. Even when grandma was growing up, she had to help butcher the pigs at her own parent’s house. Her job was to follow her mom around all day; their job was to make sure the men had what they needed, including food. So once the pigs got butchered to a decent extent, the women were in charge of cleaning out the intestines and the stomachs. They would make sausage with the intestines in preparation for cooking it and some potatoes in the stomach to make a hogmaw for dinner. (Pretty gross if you ask me, but I was enraptured by this story.)
3. Grandma went on to discuss how there were at least five pieces of the pigs that got smoked in their smokehouse. Grandma and grandpa had a smokehouse up until they sold off the farms and got their final house (the house I will always think of as their’s). There were always 2 hams, 2 shoulders, and some bacon from each pig. Grandma was always scared of the smokehouses, she said it creeped her out. She knew in her head that you smothered the fire before leaving the smoker be, but she was still worried that the fire would flare up. Her latest smokehouse was also right next to their house’s front door, just to add to the anxiety. Nothing ever happened though, except for some good smoked pork.
4. Grandma told me that my great grandma on grandpa’s side always liked to cook with greens. They weren’t a very wealthy family at all (almost poor from the way I interpreted her words), so great grandma would pick dandelions, cabbage, and lettuces from their gardens. It’s funny; grandma thinks that Aunt M.G. (my dad’s aunt) got most of her cooking skills from her mother. When she said that, I immediately flashed back to Aunt M.G. asking me to help her pull dandelions and other things from the front yard throughout the seasons. In any case, great grandma always made her hogmaw with cabbage.
5. Along with that fact came the fact that my great grandpa (on grandpa’s side) worked quite a few years in Frederick County. Just him and two mules up in the mountains, pulling logs down off the hills. Why? Because he helped to bring the logs down to the county to create the first electric lines that part of Maryland had ever seen. Meanwhile, great grandma would be down the hill with the kids, taking care of the farm and trying to save up money however possible.
6. Great grandma on grandma’s side was straight up Pennsylvania Dutch. She says almost every meal served at their table (2 parents and 7 kids, just FYI), included some kind of dough. The cooking was heavier and fattier (think Amish foods if you aren’t familiar). I find it interesting that grandma and grandpa came from two very different lines of people, but they all seem like exactly the same line to me. I guess they did have their similarities, but it sounds like grandma may have been much better off in her childhood since they had the means to provide for their family much more easily than grandpa’s seems to have.
7. Grandma doesn’t know if our generation is better off or if her’s was. While she doesn’t understand this whole Internet phenomenon totally, she says she thinks her life may have been harder. She says it was good to know exactly where your food was coming from, exactly how it had been prepared, etc. but it was a hard and difficult life to go through. She says as a young kid, you just got used to everything because that was how you lived every day. She never thought hogmaw was disgusting or that entire days of butchering were out of the ordinary. At the same time, she wonders about the kids now who grow up not even understanding where milk came from. It’s interesting to see how she wavers between her ideas of “better” just like I do. Some days I feel like I should have grown up in a different era, when things were simpler but people were more honest and worked harder to get what they needed. Days were family oriented and your livelihood came from your farms. In any case, I find it interesting that we both waver back and forth on what we consider to be better between now and then.

In any case, I’ve decided I like the Internet, even if it’s only for this one reason: I never want to forget these conversations with grandma. I want to be able to come back here as often as I want and still imagine her sitting in her favorite chair telling my sister and I these stories on a quiet, rainy Sunday night. And no matter how many more conversations I get to have with her, I am grateful to know that I came from a family who were always so close, loyal, and amazing towards one another. That’s the part I love about my family best; they kept the closeness of the family together even after family butchering days ceased to exist.

For now Internet, happy grandparents day to any grandparents out there!

~B