For Annie Dawson Wilsdon
I track her handwriting from bold and clear and bright green to blue scratches across a page, words dotting the paper, scattered here and there, no lines, last word “sorry.”
She is a person I never really knew. Yet the title of my newsletter comes from words she spoke.
She was my grandmother. Always a shadowy figure, even on those rare times my mother and brother and I visited her in far off Chicago, she blended into a background dominated by my grandfather.
My mother worshipped her father.
“Where is Mr. Wilsdon on this? Is he for or against?”—this , according to my mother’s proud recollection, was all that mattered to the neighbors in his Chicago suburb when presented with a proposal to plant a tree or widen a street.
For her mother, Annie Dawson Wilsdon, a brilliant mathematician who had supported her parents and siblings by teaching before she married and who in a different generation might have been a math professor or a computer whiz – for this woman, my mother had nothing but scorn.
“She was a wretched housekeeper and worse cook. I was embarrassed to bring friends home,” my mother would tell me. My mother preferred cousin Flo’s where Auntie Belle, the good housekeeper and excellent cook, reigned supreme. Yet, inexplicably, her father loved her mother. “He always called her ‘my golden-haired Annie,’” my mom complained, “though I never saw any gold. Her hair was white by the time I was born. That’s why I dyed my hair for years. I didn’t want you to have a white-haired mother like I did.”
My mother became a gardener because her father was a gardener. Coming home from school, she would ask her mother,” Where’s Dad?”
“Out in the garden, dear,” was always the answer.
In her early eighties she moved to Georgia to live with her son, Harry. She wrote my mother faithfully. My mother saved her letters. I do not know why. But, reading them, I discover a person I like and wish I had known. I discover as well a story laced with the thematics of aging.
“Do not return this letter,” my grandmother writes as she encloses a letter from her other daughter, Alice, “Harry and Winnie hate Alice.”
Alice, it seems, has “stolen” my grandmother’s diamond ring. Harry is trying to get it back. Is he then the greedy one? My mother always thought so.
“He took her in just to get her money.” This was my mother’s view of the matter.
Apparently there was a lot of it. In her letters my grandmother tries to be fair about funds, faithfully sending checks to my mother and to myself and my brother, but always with the awareness of Harry looking over her shoulder.
“Harry wrote this check for me to send to you. You write to him instead of me when you get it.”
Money –one of the great thematics of aging. If you don’t have it, you struggle to get it. If you have it, you struggle with how best to use it while you are alive and after you are dead. You pray not to outlive it. And you live with the fear of losing control over it, of ending up dependent and under surveillance.
I catch a glimpse of a woman who was witty as she writes further, “Harry does so much bookkeeping for me you would think I was a big merchant.”
My grandmother writes how busy Harry and Winnie are, how busy my mother is, how busy Dan is, how busy Judy is. Everyone else is busy; she is not part of the busyness. I catch a glimpse of the intergenerational family – my grandmother, her son and his wife, their daughter and her son – supposedly a source of healthy aging. But this one is without the reverence for age that might include the older one in the busyness.
I catch a glimpse of my grandmother’s sadness. “I watch TV a lot,” she writes, “but I see some of it with my eyes closed. Not that I am sleepy but it is not good. I am too old for some of it.”
I identify. I don’t relate to much of contemporary culture. I am much too old for the current craze for noise. And, yes, I am willing to label much of what passes these days for great as not very good. It is hard to feel contemporary when contemporary feels hard. Like my grandmother, I feel left behind.
Boredom, lack of purpose – how they haunt the advent of old old age. I fear the loss of my garden, the loss of energy to serve on boards or get to my Quaker meeting every week, the loss of a sense of purpose. At a garden symposium on Saturday, I sit across the table from a woman who tells me she prays every day, “Dear God, just give me one more season of gardening.” To which I can only add, “Amen.”
I catch a glimpse of the stresses in that intergenerational setting. My grandmother writes my mother a version of “burn after reading.”
“I would not babysit for Stevie [the great grandchild] at any price. He is too . . . . Destroy this letter as soon as you read it.”
I can well imagine the nightmare an out-of-control two-year-old presented to my mild-mannered grandmother. I can also imagine the stress that my grandmother’s presence must have placed on that household.
But I wonder – did she not dare to label the child’s behavior because she was afraid Harry or Winnie might read the letter? Or was she a spirit too gentle to put such a harsh feeling down on paper?
For I see her as a gentle spirit. I am deeply moved by a line in one of the letters, inspired perhaps by the affair of the diamond ring. She writes, “I cannot forsake Alice.”
Reading these letters I am in a way meeting my grandmother for the first time, both as her grandchild and as her contemporary.
My grandmother visited my mother in Franklin, but only after I was in college. So I treasure a memory she shares in a letter that creates a connection between us across time and space.
In October of 1958, returning home after a visit to Indiana, she writes “I saw you folks waving for a while. Then I lost you for a while. Saw you again standing at the corner of a building. Mary, you had your big red handbag.”
I bought that handbag for my mother in the summer of 1958, a summer I spent in Mexico improving my Spanish. It had by October become my mother’s identifying mark, one that allowed my grandmother to see and perhaps remember my mother as she returned to Georgia and Harry.
15 Likes
10 Comments
Write a comment…
Airhart II Robert
Mar 5
Such a delightful, respectful, introspective ramble through the known facts to discover the complexities of this grandmother you did not have the privilege of knowing in person. Your thoughtful stroll around Annie Dawson Wilsdon’s garden invites pondering the state of my own. Thank you..Bob Airhart