I know exactly what you mean about that depression era burned in memory. My mother was traumatized by the job of mixing yellow coloring into margarine.. it we still ate mostly margarine ( I was oldest of 5) growing up in the 50’s. Late in life my youngest sister Moi told her one time, “Mother, you are a woman of means..” ( tone of humorous chiding): plastic bags drying out on a litttle rack ( I still do that). Crumpled of tin foil flattened out and kept ( we all do that). Tiny Pyrex dishes of mystery sauce or cooked peas way back in the fridge.. ( try to keep on top of that one). Oh. And yes, Democrats to the core . I love your wallpaper story. And of course your brilliant evocative whole story. Happy Sunday and thank you.
No, i cannot correct my error because I have an iPhone. Substack doesn’t like Apple products. Grrr…as I was saying…they were the first to recycle plastic bags and aluminum foil. My mother kept almost every envelope sent to the house because she used them to write her grocery lists or reminders. I never had grandparents as they were annihilated in Germany but we lived in rural NC. Was raised by immigrant parents who fled Poland and Germany. They met in NY and moved to NC because my dad’s uncle lived there. He vowed to help set my dad up in “business”, a clothing store. He hated it but he and my mother prospered. Imagine being an only Jew in public school, in a town surrounded by Southern Baptists and their churches, of which there were many. There was the First Baptist Church, the Second Baptist Church, and so on. 1964 was my freshman year and the first time we integrated. I loved that but others, of course, were mortified, at first. Then everyone settled down. My folks have been gone since 1997 and 2006. I miss them a lot and think about their journeys to come to America for freedom. Now, I am glad they are not alive to witness the second coming of Hitler. Thank you, Jess. Your voice is so succinct and important.
It's not just the iPhone 🙂, I have the Google Pixel & I can't correct Substacks either. I've given up trying to correct my typos below my comments & just issue an acknowledgement & an apology instead 😅.
So what I do for my comments, is turn on my microphone and speak my thoughts. And then before hitting post or reply, I turn off the microphone which frees up my cursor. So then I can look back over my statements and make any corrections before I post it. It works really well for me. I usually am on my iPad like I am right now at this moment.
What a wonderful reminiscence! Grandparent memories for me were set in suburban Southern California, but still there was a big garden, bee hives, pigeon coop and fruit trees, not to mention Grandpa's hobby of deep sea fishing that provided a massive amount of fresh fish. I finally read Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead and she makes the point there about the difference between rural and urban poverty. My grandparents were peasants from the Ukraine, and brought that dirt-poor-but-you-can-grow-things-in-dirt thinking with them. When we stack people in cities without access to live-giving soil we create a whole new kind of poor (Dickens, et al). There is a spiritual element to this, isn't there? A sort of hopelessness that is countered by being closer to earth. As Kingsolver points out, even though they were poor, they could grow tomatoes, shoot squirrels, catch fish, not to mention bathe in the forest air. Concrete and asphalt don't allow that, and I think being divorced from the natural world can break something inside us. Not to be Pollyanna about rural life, but there is something to that. How did we manage to make so many people who live so close to the earth feel so hopeless? [Part II— Industrial agriculture: caloric excess and spiritual destitution? Hmmm.)
Oh, very well said Alexandra. My parents lived through the depression, and my mother had an attitude of scarcity all her life. She hoarded plastic bags, she folded them first. She kept plastic butter containers, and she ate every crust of bread and every scrap of anything that she cooked. Nothing in our house was ever allowed to go to waste, and I do mean nothing.
My mother who passed in 2016 always made that orange pineapple pecan cool whip jello thing at holidays that all of the grandkids made fun of even though they ate it. I gave my daughter age 44 my mother's recipe box a couple weeks ago and she found that recipe. She plans on making it for Christmas-LOL. Fond memories!
Yes it is! It also has numerous hand written recipes from my grandmother. She cried when I gave it to her. I thought it silly to feel proprietary about it when it is all about passing on history and memories. Your article gave me some sunshine in my heart today so thank you for that!
I know just how that must be done! Get one of those elaborate old frames from the period. Mark inside the picture opening and protect that rectangle with plastic while renovating. Put the frame up when finished! (I'd say to just cut out a rectangle of drywall, but I'm betting it's on lath and plaster, just like I'm staring at in front of me as I write this.)
"There is a persistent song in my head…things may be okay now, but I could lose everything tomorrow."
We don't like to consider that we each live on the knife edge of well-being and catastrophe. Flood, fire, illness, economic collapse, social ostracism, war are all real possibilities in the realm of our experience. Squirreling away money and resources and walling ourselves in won't save us when catastrophe does strike. Instead we will be dependent on the resources and goodwill of the communities we have built, and I hope to use some of my "nervous energy" in that direction.
I have the same song playing in my head. I didn't grow up in poverty, but my parents were very frugal and we lived comfortable on my dad's salary as a small town minister. Their frugal ways have stuck with me even as I have achieved some measure of material success - the kind that I know my grandparents would have wished for me. But the future we can foresee will present challenges that neither we nor our forebears could have imagined. I am inspired by Maryann's comment about using her "nervous energy". I'll have to figure out how to use mine.
Thanks, Jess, for a very personal and very thought- and emotion-provoking post.
I remember sitting in my grandma’s kitchen while she cooked and baked. She never followed a recipe and I was too wrapped up in my own world to think of writing anything down. My dad recreated some of her food, but he wasn’t the baker that she was and he died of cancer at 49. When she developed Alzheimer’s, all of our family’s favorite recipes were lost forever. I think about my grandparents all the time and it makes me smile. I remember playing gin rummy with my Pop-pop while he smoked his pipe and the smell of the cherrywood tobacco that he stuffed inside of it. The Sunday suppers and scrumptious desserts from Grandma were staples of my childhood. I’m sure that your grandchildren will remember the memories you are making with them.
You should start a novel about that life. It would resound with a lot of rural people or people with a rural past. I’ve been reading books by Barbara Kingsolver but your point of view is more relatable.
I haven’t met you ….. but that you like the Poisonwood Bible resonates!! I grew up on a family farm - my dad named it “Paupers Gulch”. Had both sets of grandparents well into my 30’s and beyond ( Grandma M lived to 99!) Farming, gardens, cattle, milk cows chickens pigs ….. good food on mom’s side, blue milk and saltines on the other side. But 5 sisters, 13 aunts and uncles with their families, and roots galore!! Lots of us in my generation had to break them (at least once) to appreciate what we had growing up poor!!! Happy now to be a “home comer” in an old (teeny) house with a picture window in that upstairs doorway!!!
What a beautiful tribute to your great grandparents. Recently, my husband and I retired to his grandparents’ farm which we purchased from his aunts and uncles in 1995. Your great grandparents sound just like his grandparents who became my grandparents, too. Thankfully, our children got to know them. What a blessing!
"How circumstances may change, but there’s a part of your brain that just can’t."
This is actually true. Psychologists call it 'premature cognitive commitment.'
This is one of the ways religion gets passed on. There aren't many religious folks that are of a different religion than their parents, or those around them as they grew up.
Gandhi pointed to this when he said to a follower who asked what he could do when India was being pulled apart by the two main religious factions. The man was a Hindu and Gandhi said to adopt a son and raise him as a Muslim.
As far as cognitive terms it basically has to do with blood flow and enrichment in sections of the brain. Areas that don't get used don't get as much blood and shrink or die away. If an area is enriched regularly it is healthy and grows. If presented with a new 'idea' to a section of the brain that carries those type of 'ideas' that is already 'full' of other information it won't get in or at least have enough 'fertile ground' to take hold.
This is why your not giving up is effective. You eventually create 'space' for fertile ground and the 'seeds' you planted can take root. I love that you have the courage to do this.
Of course this can be changed quickly on occasion by what I call a 'brain wash' through chemicals, either through outside events, death, job loss, marriage loss, etc. or through consumption of some sort of drug. This is one of the reasons persons who take LSD or other psychedelic drugs call it a "mind expanding" experience.
I'm a generation ahead of you, born about 20 years sooner, but have similar recollections of my grandparents farm in Central California. During the Summers meeting with all my mothers siblings and my cousins after church at my grandparents farm, the men (and us boys) harvesting and bringing into the kitchen whatever was for that weekend, and the women, my grandmother, mother, and aunts there prepping for dinner and canning what was left to be shared among the family. That farm land is now home to about 40-50 houses.
This is way longer than I intended but I want to thank you for allowing folks like me who aren't subscribers to participate in the comments. I'm almost 72, my SS is about $990 a month, I'm still working but just don't regularly have any cash to pass on for something like this. I stopped buying books years ago just using the library now. But those that have a substack that don't allow a person without subscriptions to comment seem to me like persons who would look (down) on you and say, "I'll talk to you, and maybe listen, if you give me some money." An awful lot like our current political reality.
They will Jess! What a beautiful story. They will value what you value, the stories you tell, the love you give. I grew up in rural Virginia. I can remember like yesterday sitting on my grandfathers lap in front of the wood stove, I called him Dedaddy. I was the one who made toast dripped in butter, that no matter how burnt he would choke it down anyway so as to not hurt my feelings. Our childhoods do shape the people we become and the values we hold dear and how we respect and treat others. We are grateful to you for showing us where your grit, love and courage comes from.💙
Reading you, I always feel like I’ve known you forever. Your stories are my stories, too. I can see the people you describe because, while I never knew them, I knew people made of the same stuff. I miss them.
Beautiful story Jess! And thanks for the wallpaper photo too. You are a terrific writer.
And a terrific person.
I know exactly what you mean about that depression era burned in memory. My mother was traumatized by the job of mixing yellow coloring into margarine.. it we still ate mostly margarine ( I was oldest of 5) growing up in the 50’s. Late in life my youngest sister Moi told her one time, “Mother, you are a woman of means..” ( tone of humorous chiding): plastic bags drying out on a litttle rack ( I still do that). Crumpled of tin foil flattened out and kept ( we all do that). Tiny Pyrex dishes of mystery sauce or cooked peas way back in the fridge.. ( try to keep on top of that one). Oh. And yes, Democrats to the core . I love your wallpaper story. And of course your brilliant evocative whole story. Happy Sunday and thank you.
Funny how those oddities of our childhood come back to us in ways that we copy them. They were the first to
No, i cannot correct my error because I have an iPhone. Substack doesn’t like Apple products. Grrr…as I was saying…they were the first to recycle plastic bags and aluminum foil. My mother kept almost every envelope sent to the house because she used them to write her grocery lists or reminders. I never had grandparents as they were annihilated in Germany but we lived in rural NC. Was raised by immigrant parents who fled Poland and Germany. They met in NY and moved to NC because my dad’s uncle lived there. He vowed to help set my dad up in “business”, a clothing store. He hated it but he and my mother prospered. Imagine being an only Jew in public school, in a town surrounded by Southern Baptists and their churches, of which there were many. There was the First Baptist Church, the Second Baptist Church, and so on. 1964 was my freshman year and the first time we integrated. I loved that but others, of course, were mortified, at first. Then everyone settled down. My folks have been gone since 1997 and 2006. I miss them a lot and think about their journeys to come to America for freedom. Now, I am glad they are not alive to witness the second coming of Hitler. Thank you, Jess. Your voice is so succinct and important.
It's not just the iPhone 🙂, I have the Google Pixel & I can't correct Substacks either. I've given up trying to correct my typos below my comments & just issue an acknowledgement & an apology instead 😅.
Doesn’t that drive you crazy?? Yeah, guess I should do the same.
So what I do for my comments, is turn on my microphone and speak my thoughts. And then before hitting post or reply, I turn off the microphone which frees up my cursor. So then I can look back over my statements and make any corrections before I post it. It works really well for me. I usually am on my iPad like I am right now at this moment.
What a wonderful reminiscence! Grandparent memories for me were set in suburban Southern California, but still there was a big garden, bee hives, pigeon coop and fruit trees, not to mention Grandpa's hobby of deep sea fishing that provided a massive amount of fresh fish. I finally read Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead and she makes the point there about the difference between rural and urban poverty. My grandparents were peasants from the Ukraine, and brought that dirt-poor-but-you-can-grow-things-in-dirt thinking with them. When we stack people in cities without access to live-giving soil we create a whole new kind of poor (Dickens, et al). There is a spiritual element to this, isn't there? A sort of hopelessness that is countered by being closer to earth. As Kingsolver points out, even though they were poor, they could grow tomatoes, shoot squirrels, catch fish, not to mention bathe in the forest air. Concrete and asphalt don't allow that, and I think being divorced from the natural world can break something inside us. Not to be Pollyanna about rural life, but there is something to that. How did we manage to make so many people who live so close to the earth feel so hopeless? [Part II— Industrial agriculture: caloric excess and spiritual destitution? Hmmm.)
Oh, very well said Alexandra. My parents lived through the depression, and my mother had an attitude of scarcity all her life. She hoarded plastic bags, she folded them first. She kept plastic butter containers, and she ate every crust of bread and every scrap of anything that she cooked. Nothing in our house was ever allowed to go to waste, and I do mean nothing.
My mother who passed in 2016 always made that orange pineapple pecan cool whip jello thing at holidays that all of the grandkids made fun of even though they ate it. I gave my daughter age 44 my mother's recipe box a couple weeks ago and she found that recipe. She plans on making it for Christmas-LOL. Fond memories!
What a treasure!!! I can only imagine inheriting a handwritten recipe box
Yes it is! It also has numerous hand written recipes from my grandmother. She cried when I gave it to her. I thought it silly to feel proprietary about it when it is all about passing on history and memories. Your article gave me some sunshine in my heart today so thank you for that!
I love the story. It shows that happiness is not dependent on the accumulation of stuff.
Such a wonderful story! And never get rid of that wallpaper…you at least have to preserve a square of it in the room when renovating.
I know just how that must be done! Get one of those elaborate old frames from the period. Mark inside the picture opening and protect that rectangle with plastic while renovating. Put the frame up when finished! (I'd say to just cut out a rectangle of drywall, but I'm betting it's on lath and plaster, just like I'm staring at in front of me as I write this.)
I love this idea.
That wall paper is a treasure.
Not enough people consider this truth:
"There is a persistent song in my head…things may be okay now, but I could lose everything tomorrow."
We don't like to consider that we each live on the knife edge of well-being and catastrophe. Flood, fire, illness, economic collapse, social ostracism, war are all real possibilities in the realm of our experience. Squirreling away money and resources and walling ourselves in won't save us when catastrophe does strike. Instead we will be dependent on the resources and goodwill of the communities we have built, and I hope to use some of my "nervous energy" in that direction.
Great “plan” .. using your nervous energy to build “the resources and goodwill” of your community
Which will include many families !
We need this everywhere. Than you for the nudge you just brought me! Have a wonderful Sunday 🤗
I have the same song playing in my head. I didn't grow up in poverty, but my parents were very frugal and we lived comfortable on my dad's salary as a small town minister. Their frugal ways have stuck with me even as I have achieved some measure of material success - the kind that I know my grandparents would have wished for me. But the future we can foresee will present challenges that neither we nor our forebears could have imagined. I am inspired by Maryann's comment about using her "nervous energy". I'll have to figure out how to use mine.
Thanks, Jess, for a very personal and very thought- and emotion-provoking post.
I remember sitting in my grandma’s kitchen while she cooked and baked. She never followed a recipe and I was too wrapped up in my own world to think of writing anything down. My dad recreated some of her food, but he wasn’t the baker that she was and he died of cancer at 49. When she developed Alzheimer’s, all of our family’s favorite recipes were lost forever. I think about my grandparents all the time and it makes me smile. I remember playing gin rummy with my Pop-pop while he smoked his pipe and the smell of the cherrywood tobacco that he stuffed inside of it. The Sunday suppers and scrumptious desserts from Grandma were staples of my childhood. I’m sure that your grandchildren will remember the memories you are making with them.
Our grandkids call my husband pop pop❤️
My grandson calls me pop pop.
Thank you for this story. It made my Sunday morning! You are a gifted writer.
You should start a novel about that life. It would resound with a lot of rural people or people with a rural past. I’ve been reading books by Barbara Kingsolver but your point of view is more relatable.
I absolutely love the Poisonwood Bible!
That’s the one I’m about to finish. Also read Demon Copperhead
I haven’t met you ….. but that you like the Poisonwood Bible resonates!! I grew up on a family farm - my dad named it “Paupers Gulch”. Had both sets of grandparents well into my 30’s and beyond ( Grandma M lived to 99!) Farming, gardens, cattle, milk cows chickens pigs ….. good food on mom’s side, blue milk and saltines on the other side. But 5 sisters, 13 aunts and uncles with their families, and roots galore!! Lots of us in my generation had to break them (at least once) to appreciate what we had growing up poor!!! Happy now to be a “home comer” in an old (teeny) house with a picture window in that upstairs doorway!!!
What a beautiful tribute to your great grandparents. Recently, my husband and I retired to his grandparents’ farm which we purchased from his aunts and uncles in 1995. Your great grandparents sound just like his grandparents who became my grandparents, too. Thankfully, our children got to know them. What a blessing!
"How circumstances may change, but there’s a part of your brain that just can’t."
This is actually true. Psychologists call it 'premature cognitive commitment.'
This is one of the ways religion gets passed on. There aren't many religious folks that are of a different religion than their parents, or those around them as they grew up.
Gandhi pointed to this when he said to a follower who asked what he could do when India was being pulled apart by the two main religious factions. The man was a Hindu and Gandhi said to adopt a son and raise him as a Muslim.
As far as cognitive terms it basically has to do with blood flow and enrichment in sections of the brain. Areas that don't get used don't get as much blood and shrink or die away. If an area is enriched regularly it is healthy and grows. If presented with a new 'idea' to a section of the brain that carries those type of 'ideas' that is already 'full' of other information it won't get in or at least have enough 'fertile ground' to take hold.
This is why your not giving up is effective. You eventually create 'space' for fertile ground and the 'seeds' you planted can take root. I love that you have the courage to do this.
Of course this can be changed quickly on occasion by what I call a 'brain wash' through chemicals, either through outside events, death, job loss, marriage loss, etc. or through consumption of some sort of drug. This is one of the reasons persons who take LSD or other psychedelic drugs call it a "mind expanding" experience.
I'm a generation ahead of you, born about 20 years sooner, but have similar recollections of my grandparents farm in Central California. During the Summers meeting with all my mothers siblings and my cousins after church at my grandparents farm, the men (and us boys) harvesting and bringing into the kitchen whatever was for that weekend, and the women, my grandmother, mother, and aunts there prepping for dinner and canning what was left to be shared among the family. That farm land is now home to about 40-50 houses.
This is way longer than I intended but I want to thank you for allowing folks like me who aren't subscribers to participate in the comments. I'm almost 72, my SS is about $990 a month, I'm still working but just don't regularly have any cash to pass on for something like this. I stopped buying books years ago just using the library now. But those that have a substack that don't allow a person without subscriptions to comment seem to me like persons who would look (down) on you and say, "I'll talk to you, and maybe listen, if you give me some money." An awful lot like our current political reality.
You're real. That's why I luv ya.
❤️❤️❤️
They will Jess! What a beautiful story. They will value what you value, the stories you tell, the love you give. I grew up in rural Virginia. I can remember like yesterday sitting on my grandfathers lap in front of the wood stove, I called him Dedaddy. I was the one who made toast dripped in butter, that no matter how burnt he would choke it down anyway so as to not hurt my feelings. Our childhoods do shape the people we become and the values we hold dear and how we respect and treat others. We are grateful to you for showing us where your grit, love and courage comes from.💙
I love that story, Finale! Dedaddy❤️
Reading you, I always feel like I’ve known you forever. Your stories are my stories, too. I can see the people you describe because, while I never knew them, I knew people made of the same stuff. I miss them.
❤️
You painted a beautiful verbal picture. Thank you.
Not many things better than a good sweet potato.
T