Handkerchief shower

We have several weddings occurring this summer and fall.
Four, to be exact, from May to October.

All are exciting and joyous occasions for families and friends to be together to celebrate the beginning of a couple's life together. We are honored to be included.

Since many of the couples have been on their own for several years and have even already purchased their own homes, it is a puzzle sometimes to think of gift ideas.

But, of course, they have solved that problem for you by registering at various department stores. All you have to do is check a store computer, print out their list, and get one of the items they have already selected, which includes everything from dishes and towels to hammers and grill tools. I can't help but think it takes some of the surprise element away, even it it is practical.

I tend to ignore these lists and get the couple something I would want for myself, or wish for as a gift for my home. Something they may not even have thought of, or something special that they wouldn't buy themselves. A lovely piece of porcelain, perhaps, or a set of cordial glasses. Maybe a relish dish and fork, something along that order.

Along with weddings come the bridal showers that precede the big event. Again, you refer to the department store computer registers. Which, as I said, I tend to ignore.

I learned something about showers held in my grandmother's day. While going through her bundles of cards and letters, tied together neatly with string, or kept in organized fashion in variety store paper bags, I came across the following invitation:

A handkerchief shower?  Really?

But, of course, in Grandma's day, women were never without handkerchiefs. From formal, hand-embroidered designs to crocheted edges to everyday stamped patterns, they wore them in their apron and dress pockets, carried them in their purses, or clutched them in their hand.

Always, always, a handkerchief. Precisely pressed, creased corners, perhaps even starched. Lace borders for special occasions, dime-store variety for everyday.

And so I can see where a handkerchief shower would be most valuable. After all, a woman would go through many of them from one washday to the next.

To me, the special part about it would be using the handkerchiefs knowing who they came from, that it was selected with care just for me, and wondering just which handkerchief I would carry today.

I, for one, would love to see this custom come back. How quaint and how special.

Think about it. Haven't we really lost something going through a department store with a computer list to see what isn't checked off? I think so.


Or perhaps I was just born in the wrong time.

Keeper of lessons

Yesterday I spent some more time sorting through the boxes of my Grandmother's cards and letters. I am still in awe of all she saved and am convinced I am just discovering them now for a good reason.

You've heard the saying, When the student is ready, the teacher appears? I am devouring these old letters of Grandma's like a hungry child, so eager to open the next envelope, unfold the next letter, read the next news from one of her three sisters, or her brother, Pete, who signed his letters, Your lonesome brother, Pete. Now, why was he lonesome? Until recently, I may not have been curious. Now I am.

I know so very little about my Grandmother's own family, and yet they were alive when I was growing up. Sure, maybe I heard them referred to as Aunt Johanna or Aunt Katie sometimes. But I never realized they were real people. With lives. That were connected to my Grandma. That my Grandma was ever anything but my Grandma. As if she were born that way, born just to be there in that time to be my Grandma.

Now I am realizing she was more than a Grandma (to nineteen of us), more than my father's mother, more than a farm wife, more than a cook, a gardener, a mender of socks.

My Grandmother, lower middle.
Johanna standing in back.
Mary on left; Katie on right.

She was a sister. She was a daughter. Someone's child. A teenager, a young woman in love, a newlywed, a young mother.

Somewhere during her young womanhood, she came from Ida Grove, Iowa to live as a housekeeper in South Dakota and met my Grandfather. I don't know if she ever looked back, but she never returned to Iowa to live, though two of her sisters and her brother remained.

Through the years that followed, letters were sent back and forth: first 1-cent, then 2-cent, then 4-cent stamps affixed to the yellowed envelopes.

Usually they started with, My dear sister or Dear Stina or sometimes just, Dear sister.

They told of ordinary occurrences: the flu bug going around, a wind storm in town last week, the price of eggs, butter and dry goods, butchering cattle, plans for Thanksgiving, kids coming for Easter, how are your crops doing this year, and so on.

Everyday things in everyday lives.

What was extraordinary was that these letters were filed and saved. Tucked away in shoeboxes with little notes written on the envelopes as to the date received and the date answered. It's just what was done back then. One didn't just throw them away. And now, these letters saved, I am learning about my Grandma in a role different from who she was as just my Grandma.

But it got me to thinking: Who is the keeper of the lessons of today? And what are the lessons of today?

Letter writing? A thing of the past. Photos? Taken with a phone, shared on Facebook, stored on the computer, if at all.  Lacey Valentine cards? Bygone days, from the past. Christmas greetings? Now an e-mail sent with one keystroke to a distribution list, or a duplicated generic letter.

How, I wonder, will our great-grandchildren learn about our ordinary lives of today? I pride myself on keeping the clutter down and too easily toss Mother's Day cards, Easter greetings, birthday cards and the like. I tell myself my children don't want all this stuff and certainly won't treat it with any reverence. Of no importance, this stuff, of no value that I can see now.

But in the future, these things may be clues. What may not seem worth keeping today may be my grandchild's delight to discover some day.

From now on, I think I'll take the chance and tuck these things away. I'll definitely save the postmark and the stamp, or note the date.

I can be the keeper of today's lessons; still teach and talk to my grandchildren, here or not, through these treasures of the past.

Wash day

Today is laundry day.

I love doing the laundry. There's just something about putting dirty clothes into the machine with sweet-smelling soap and fabric softener, and taking them out all clean and fresh.

But it got me thinking about laundry days of bygone times. Back to when I was washing diapers in a wringer washer and hanging them on the line to dry, like banners announcing there was a baby in the house. Putting sheets on the bed, fresh from flapping in the summer breeze.  Dishtowels that were bleached and sanitized by the sun.

Come to think of it, doing the laundry has always been my favorite household chore.

My mother tells the story of hanging clothes on the line in our back yard, and the time she cleaned out her cedar chest. Deciding her wedding veil would benefit from a freshening breeze before repacking it away, she hung it over two lines to keep it from touching the ground.

A little while later, from the kitchen window, she gasped as she observed my twin sisters rolling a big rubber ball through the loop of the veil. One twin on one end, one twin on the other end, laughing in delight as the ball rolled through the veil.

When I was 19, my girlfriend, Jeanette, and I shared an apartment. It was in a very large house on the west side of St. Paul, divided into various apartments, ours being on the first floor.  We were free to use the wringer washer in the basement. It was one of those old, dark and damp cement basements. A true basement.

Since the apartment rent took most of our meager earnings as young secretaries at the Great Northern Railroad Company, the washing machine allowed us to save a dollar or two and avoid a trip to the laundromat. 

But we were frightened to be down there in the dark, dingy basement. A stranger could easily enter the basement door and accost us in any manner.  If we did the laundry together, we would both be attacked. And who would hear our piercing screams?

So it was decided that one of us (me) would do the laundry, while the other stood guard in our apartment directly above, kitchen knife in hand. Ready to attack and defend.

It is a wonder we didn't kill each other.  And we never did see a lurking stranger. Or another single soul.

Of course, laundry days of old, with clothes made of cotton, led to ironing days. My least favorite chore.

My son and daughter-in-law recently bought a new washer and dryer. They do everything but cook dinner, and I'm surprised they don't do that. The washer senses the weight of the clothes to adjust the water level automatically, and when you push start, it lights up like it's taking off for Mars. The dryer has a steam setting, along with about twenty more options. No more dry cleaning bills.

The buzzer has sounded on my humble washer here in Mesa, so it's time to put the next load in.

It is Tuesday today.  I thought Mondays were "wash days."  Didn't they always used to be?