Gramma's Rocking Chair

She sat, enfolded in shadows, brushing her long, dark hair. Gramma rocked gently, the rhythm of her brush matching the soft ‘tap tap’ of her slippers on the floor.

This was Gramma’s routine for as long as I can remember. Brushing her hair while rocking in her favorite old chair. As I sat on the edge of her bed, watching her sing-song movements, I wondered if I’d ever look like that. She hardly had a gray hair, even after raising eight children during the Great Depression. Four sons in WWII, one daughter stillborn, another daughter disabled after a fall from the porch. Gramma was an amazing woman.

Born into large family herself, Gramma helped raise her brothers and sisters. Her mother was of German stock and one of the families who pioneered in the Iowa Territory before it became a state. Her father was Irish and Cherokee-Choctaw Indian. She always laughed about that combination, especially with her dark hair and eyes and long skirts, the neighbor children would tease her about being “gypsy”. She’d chase them off with a broom, certainly not helping her image as that ‘gypsy Indian’ woman. “Gypsy” was not a nice name in those days. 

Her name was Elsie. Elsie May. She married my grandfather when she was only seventeen years old, and had her first child at the tender age of eighteen. Grampa was of old German stock…his family’s origins reaching back to the Switzerland Mennonites escaping religious persecution. He was twenty one when he married Elsie, and loved that woman all his life.

Elsie and her new husband started a restaurant in a small town in Iowa, near where they grew up. The business failed because her husband had such a kind heart he gave food away to anyone who needed. After joining the railroad, like his own grandfather, Grampa raised his family for thirty years on the wages of a foreman. Elsie and Eber had their job cut out for them as a parents of eight during the Depression.

Gramma knew how to cook! Everything from ‘scratch’ and made to fill as many hungry mouths as possible. Good, filling, old fashioned German foods….homemade noodles, steaming in a huge pot of beef broth…I’ll never forget how good it was to go to Gramma’s on Sunday for dinner!

Not until many years later did I realize how difficult it must have been for her to feed so many with so little.

Elsie had migraines. Oh, how this poor woman suffered, and how she could cope with eight children, only God knows. I inherited her migraines, so I know coping is not easy.

Elsie’s father, James, was a barber in town. Now, in those days, being a barber meant also pulling teeth and fixing minor injuries. James’ mother, Mahala (the full blood Choctaw) was a ‘medicine woman’, working with the local doctor as a midwife. Everyone called her “Mahaley” and she was well respected.

I wonder if Elsie ever watched her Gramma brushing her long , black hair?

Elsie’s eldest daughter, Zola, was healthy and strong, and helped her mother raise all those children. Many years later, Zola told me how her mother agonized over her sons’ welfare in the War. How they kept track of my father when it was reported he was missing when his ship, the U.S.S. Helena was sunk in the Kula Gulf. He came home a hero. My Gramma was a hero too.

As she sat there, in the twilight of her little bedroom, in the house she raised her family in, I admired her strong face, her gentle hands, her tiny feet tapping the floor as she rocked. By this time, her husband had passed away, her children were all grown and gone (with children of their own), and she was living alone in that big old house.

The memories of her life surrounding her, her eldest granddaughter watching her, silently, sharing a moment neither would forget.

As I looked around the room, I saw the pillow my father had sent her while onboard the U.S.S. Helena. Silk, with fringe and tassels, as only a war era souvenir pillow could be. “The U.S.S. Helena” proudly printed on the front, and my father’s signature: “To My Mother, with Love”. The handwriting was typical of a seventeen year old, in it’s happy scrawl. This was just before Pearl Harbor. Little did either of them know, in a few short weeks, the beginning of a long series of sea battles would commence.

I saw the picture of Grampa on the wall. The old oak frame with it’s well cared for patina, surrounding his photo. He was twenty one in that picture, and I could see why my Gramma loved him so. Bright blue eyes, handsome, and a kindness that one could detect in that gentle face. They made a beautiful couple.

There, on her dresser top, sitting on a hand-crocheted doily, were her toiletries. An old atomizer for the perfume she rarely wore. A small pin tray for her hair pins when she let that long hair down at night. She told me it was a “Jenny Lynd” tray, made of milk glass. An old gilt-framed hand mirror, small scissors, a button off her mother’s dress.

That old rocking chair: Grampa made it for her when their first child was born. She suckled them all, rocked them to sleep, comforted the crying….all in that big old chair.

Gramma’s long gone now. Her big old chair sits in her eldest grandson’s home.

I’ll never forget Gramma’s Rocking Chair and the life she lived in it.