Destiny

I can’t help it.  When I reach the end of my rope, I again tell the twins that when I was 12-years-old, my father had been dead for two years, my mother recently starting a job as acting post master, my two older sisters gone from the home, I had the responsibility of the family during the day.

Jeanette & Verla

 I cooked, cleaned, took the bread out of the oven, tended the younger kids. Of course, they won’t remember it that way. They remember that I was cross and  bossy and all they had to eat was Lipton’s Instant Soup.  Today as the twins ignore me, I expand my sob story. “I didn’t have grandparents either, but if I had I would have said, ‘Grandma, you look old and tired, is there anything I can do to help you today?’”

“Yaw. Yaw. You told us already, Grandma” as they keep their noses in their electronic devices.

It’s all true. My two older brothers, ages 14 and 16, may have been out to the sheep herd some. 

DeLoy, Lucy, Shirley, Lynn James,
        Jerry, Jeanette, Carol Lee, Verla  

Still there was my younger brother 11-years-old and two younger sisters 3 and 8. Mama had to be at the post office at 5 AM when the mail truck came through to receive and sort the mail. She came home to fix breakfast and went back at 9 and stayed until 5 PM.  We raised two big gardens. I know the boys won’t remember this, but I mowed the lawn with a push mower more than my share of the time.  I have a picture of me holding the rope on the cow while she grazed on the ditch bank. No, I didn’t milk the cows. Mama helped the boys milk but none of us girls learned to milk. Our cousin, VeRene, did.  We were always a bit envious. We hoed, harvested, and bottled fruit and vegetables.  Some years we raised alfalfa and had to haul hay.

Daddy, Jerry, Carol Lee
Jeanette, DeLoy, & cousin Derryll Heaton

The younger ones tromped.  When I was 14, Mama forcefully persuaded me to go ask my cousin Burke for a job at the café. I washed dishes, helped Beth with the laundry, ironing, and kids. I remember vividly hanging out clothes behind the café. They lived above the café with six or eight kids.  When I was 16, I got a full-time summer job at the Valley Café and saved every penny for school.

When we get together, everyone remembers me as scolding them for wearing their muddy manure-clad boots in the house after I had just mopped the floor or just throwing them around when I tried to teach them to stack them nicely behind the stove.  No one remembers the good I did or the responsibilities I had, so maybe I should have just played electronic games all day like my granddaughters.

Now I’m approaching 80, as Ed reminds me almost every day, I fix all the meals for our family of eight at the moment, do all the dishes, all the cleaning and everybody hates and despises me just as they did when I was a 12-year-old. (Truth be told, most of the time, the twins won't touch the meals I prepare so I'm only feeding six. Obviously, they have not lived through a World War or Great Depression; and both parents are still alive.)  I have a constant roar in my right deaf ear, I have bleeding hemorrhoids that terrify me; thyroid cancer, an acoustic neuroma, as well as  pain-ridden knees and back, commensurate with my age.  As in days of yore, no one seems to notice or care.  It’s my destiny.