Soft Blue
Gramma’s eyes spoke in soft blue, like the late-day summer sky just as nimbus clouds become bundles but before flashes claim thunder’s rumbling.
Dad traveled to see her as a matter of routine, and on these trips sometimes I was invited to tag along. We got to her house one winter night with the Wisconsin blizzard baring its teeth before we arrived. The wind bit us and blew us into the house and once inside, the frost kept creeping at the windows and doors, sliding from the seams in the walls and slithering across the uncarpeted floors. The night got late, and without planning it, we stayed. There was no electricity upstairs, so she led me there by flashlight. The wind whistled outside the windows and some of it sang on the sills. The heat of the wood cook stove wasn’t bold and brave enough to consider climbing to the rooms above. She peeled back the covers and I crawled into the bed fully clothed. She tucked me in, covering me with a mountain of musty, woolen coats. So heavy. So secure. I breathed hard as my soul whispered I was safe from everything evil in the world.
Dad said that when he was a kid she would punch down the bread dough and shape the loaves while quizzing him on multiplication and division, and that’s how he got so good at math. Gramma’s workspace was a narrow wooden table that doubled as a dining place for early breakfasts and light lunches and solo supper meals. There was just enough room to walk through the kitchen in single file. Along the wall stood a barrel of potatoes, a barrel of flour, some crocks of sugar and other baking things.
Chickens skittered about her yard, scratching up creepers and roosting on the wood pile. Across the gravel road, sheep meandered in the meadow, bleating out welcomes when we crossed over in the summertime. Did she shear and card her own yarn or did she sell it? In the old barn, a few dairy cows stood tied in stalls. Likely she milked them by hand, but no one told me so.
A walnut piano held its place in the parlor, but I never heard her sing as she played it. There are stories she could have shared, but it wasn’t important to tell them. I sense more than I know of my gramma. As I get older I wonder, did she really work the field behind a one-horse plow? Did she really go to mass daily?
We lived lifetimes away from her, or so it seemed to me as a kid. Visiting the farm was stepping into a part of my history that shouldn’t have felt so ancient, so foreign, so distant. Why is her story hidden from me? Were there so few good times to tell, not much for the clan to happily share? Her grandparents “came over on the boat”, as the saying goes, met and married in America. She was second generation American and always first part Irish. Gramma grew a sturdy branch for the family tree: twelve children; one priest and four religious sisters; several teachers; quite a few rednecks. Thin and thrifty, hardworking and wholesome, she had heard the stories that her folks’ folks told and breathed them into her being. So, why didn’t I hear about hers?
As a thirteen year old, I stood at her casket wearing a soft blue dress. A neighbor man who knew my dad when he was a kid told of how he would drive down the gravel road out front of the house and go slow so he could hear the family singing. “In sweet harmony,” he added. His eyes welled with tears. He looked at me, at my dress, and my eyes. “There,” he said, “there she is.”
All of my uncles and aunts have blue eyes like Gramma’s. Most of my children do, too, but I am the one blessed by Gramma’s eyes. She gave them to me. With them I see hard work as a good, holy thing, a task given by God to glorify him by. I see children as gifts from God and a reason to carry on. I see fresh bread and a pot of peeled potatoes as a feast for everyday kings and queens.
In my teen years, when I was lost and alone, her eyes revived me. Body and soul I believe she prayed for me and because of her prayers, I was guarded, guided into making better, harder choices for my life. When I look in the mirror, her eyes look back at me.
