She had a link to people who I never knew very well and people who I do know quite well but who knew them in a way that I never could because she knew them before I was born. My grandmother. She died a day or so ago. I have only told one person, before I am telling you.
She was born in Smallville back in 1921 on April 26. I am not sure if she was born at home on Emily street or in a hospital, but she was born. There are many things to say about her early life, most of it I don't know. Emily street is on the wrong side of town. Her mother celebrated her eighteenth birthday, the day before. Being on the wrong side of town, electricity in homes was not a common thing, nor were indoor toilets. When she was young her father introduced electric lighting to the house and to the outhouse. She proudly said that she was the only one on the street, on the hill that had a light to guide the way to the lou, in the dead of night and in the Winter.
She cut through Claude street and over the Railway, not at a legal crossing, walking passed the house of her future husband, skirting far around their duck pond, which was filled with the cartankuous beasts to get to school, Victory School. A path that I would take to walk to work, some eighty years later sans the duck pond and the house that was torn down and replaced with The Friends, a private community housing complex.
Her parent's house was a model of both efficiency and terribly dangerous unsound practices that threatened anyone who stayed within with near certain death, yet no one ever died. The single wood stove was the only heat source in the house and the only means for cooking. The chimney snaked its way through the entire house in a mimicry of central heating, but dangerous because of the potential for creosote buildup, the number one cause of chimney fires, and therefore house fires and winter lose of homes at the time. But the house did not burn down and is still there disguised under a layer of prefab aluminum siding. Vinyl siding.
But the house did not get working toilets for decades after. She married her husband in The War. World War Two, the second war to end all wars. And was introduced to indoor plumbing. There was a little resentment there mixed with the statement that they were the only ones to have a light to the outhouse, but they were the last to still use that outhouse too.. She moved with my grandfather out to the west coast, but moved back to Smallville to give birth to my father and they lived in a little house behind the local funeral home on Miller Street. There was a lot of resentment there, between her and that funeral home, but not due to living next door.
Being the only funeral home in town meant that they could charge a lot for their services, but did not create any value for the customers. When she buried her father and mother it was the same shabby room that it had been since it was built. The expectation that you had to pay them anyways. They only updated their facilities when the second funeral home opened up, because they were forced to. Change under duress is not any change at all.
Not long after that's he moved to Forest street, to a house that was kitty corner, nearly so, to her husbands family's home, nearly across from the School that she attended as a child. Growing up in a small town like Smallville means that if you dig deep enough, you can find connections to everyone in the town. For instance, MPTR's grandfather was practicing learning to drive next door and my grandmother was warned, out of fear that my father would be run over because of his poor driving. That I was told when I started dating MPTR. Other connections and coincidents that happen over the years are taken as less strange because of connections within the town, even when they occur outside the town. Like when the boy that cut through their backyard on Forest street to get to school. Many years later, after my grandparents had moved away they decided to move again and the coincidentally purchased his home that he was selling in Grimsby so he could move back to Smallville. He just walked by me this second actually, he used part of the money from the house sale to buy a hotel and later invest in a Tim Horton's and later build the Laundromat that I am sitting in. Odd connections.
Other odd connections. There my Grandmother was a Taylor, born a Taylor. I currently live in a house that was built by and for one of her uncles. There are more than one Taylor in town though and they are not related. I am related to the ones that built the Tannery in town, but there is another Taylor family in town that built their wealth from the Fur Trade and one of their descendants became a local large construction company. He has a trophy on his wall that he sets out to show people that his family had athletic roots, roots in greatness. It is funny when people do this, especially when it was my Grandmother that won that trophy and not his. She won the smimming race across the Harbour back in that day, not his, but not valuing a trophy is something that my family does, it is just a thing, they through it out and his family collected it. I think it is funny.
Back in those times, after the War, things were different. How different is hard to understand. They bought a car, but neither of them knew how to drive it. Back then, though, they were told that it was simple to learn. Someone came over and took my grandmother for a ride and that was her only lesson, and from that lesson she taught my grandfather. That was it.
When my father was eleven, they moved to a new town far away. They moved to Prescott Ontario and I know next to nothing about her life there, except it was a life of leisure. Women were expected to do housework all day and that was the work they did, but she was living in the golden age when the work that she was doing was getting many new innovations like the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner and others that cut how much work she needed to do and her husband was earning enough money that she did not have to work. One thing I do know about that time was that after dinner, they used to play games like Scrabble, Cribbage and Bridge, loser had to do the dishes. To this day, I can't beat my father in scrabble, he tells me that they regularly got 400 point games when they played.
I was born many years ago, and my sister soon after. I remember visiting them after they moved to Stoney Creek into an apartment building. My mother dressed us up in grandparent friendly hallowe'en costumes, paper mâché bunny heads to trick or treat them, later they dropped my sister off with them on Grimsby while I was taken for a week long camping canoe trip with my parents to Algonquin Park. I remember when I was in the canoe and was told if I shouted something, it would come back to me, an echo. I shouted "Grandma ________!" and it came back. I was 3 or 4.
We soon moved to Smallville and not long afterwards they followed suit. They plied us with sweets that they made every time we visited them. On Saturdays they had better cartoons than we had, they had cable TV, we did not. Later after he had died, back in 2001, she continued on. Still had the treats but we talked. Occasionally we talked about my dad when he was young and the dumb things he had done. She told me about the things that she and my grandfather had done. I got insight into the adult lives of my grandparents, but I also got confirmation about my family legacy Alcoholism. I knew that my father has it, I know my sister has it, both of them have smartened up, I know that if I ever touched the stuff, I would have had that problem. She told me at her father had it and that her husband had it too. But that where her father was not smart about it, my grandfather was; he realized when he was drunk he could not drive and told my grandmother to drive.
From her eyes I was able to confirm that the path of my Autism, was through the men. My grandfather was an engineer, but not the kind that you get today. He did not have four years of university and two more years of Grad school, he took e long route: years of apprenticeship followed by writing tests to complete the long steady path. I learned that before the war he helped build the road through Algonquin Park, drilling the holes for blasting the rock by hand, sledgehammer and drill spike, quarter turns between strikes. I did not learn what he did in the War though. I am sure that there are many families that have that gap.
But I will miss her, my Grandmother, my last. My second last connection to that time, last from that time though.
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