The Only One

Thoughts that still raise tears of gratitude.

The Only One

On the one hand, I never really knew all that much about her. I know a lot of people did. But not a one of them ever wrote about her, and that ends here.

She was born in the late nineteenth century, and was named Charlotte. I know she was one of a large family, and she learned early-on how to care for children. She learned values, and honesty, and faith.

Then one day she met Earl, a college professor. They married, and bought a large farm on his salary. That event took place just before the Great Depression hit, during which, farmers were the lucky ones.

Charlotte bore ten children, four boys and six girls. One of the girls died as a child. But everything was placed on hold when Earl had a stroke. “Charlotte,” he pleaded, “Don’t take me to the hospital. If you do, I’ll die!” A few months later the stroke repeated itself, and he died anyway.

Charlotte found herself in an unenviable position. A houseful of children, all at home, a four hundred acre farm to take care of and no husband. That alone would have ended things, for most people. Quite honestly, from what I do know about her, I believe she never hesitated. What had to be done was now her job, and hers alone.

These were the days when tractors and tractor-drawn implements were all still rareties. Anyone who knows farming, also knows that draft horses are far from maintenance-free. They have to be fed and watered, curried and shod. They occasionally need vet attention, and they age. Cows and dairy farms have that issue times how ever many cows they have. Of course, cows don’t need shoes, but they must be bred, and culled, and fed, and milked. In those days there were no tank trucks or for that matter, milk processing plants, and bulk tanks had yet to be invented. Milk had a particularly short lifespan without refrigeration. And, you don’t feed a farm family of ten without butchering. At least, Earl had had the good sense to plant an orchard, and kept pigs for the meat.

The farm was perhaps eighty percent tillable, with the balance being woodlot. Self-sufficient farming meant a whole lot of woodcutting, and you didn’t drag out the chainsaws, either, when the leaves started to fall. Woodcutting was done in the snow when there were no crops to tend. The woodlot had a single road through it, from end to end, wide enough for one horse-drawn wagon. Down through the woods they would go, often in snow two feet deep, cutting and sawing up trees as they went, dead wood first. Sharpening the two-man bucksaws had always been Earl’s job, and it fell to the oldest boy to handle that task. Charlotte taught him how.

The farmhouse had a wood stove in every large room and a wood-burning cook stove in the kitchen. When you burn a lot of green wood you have flue fires, especially when cleaning three flues every week from the roof of a two-story house is the alternative. When they happened, you filled the wooden fire buckets, said a prayer and allowed them to burn out. Most flues of the time were un-lined.

To the family, Charlotte was simply “Mother.” Her days never really ended, and she slept lightly, knowing what was next on any given day. Seed bins were metal-lined and kept safe from rats, and from rain. Corn cribs were something different. Feed hay for cows was not what you fed the horses, and straw for bedding was kept well-away. One day found her in the kitchen, canning beets and hard-boiling eggs. The next might find her pitching hay beside her young men, or fixing a horse-drawn planter. A sick animal was an emergency, a sick child, an immediate doctor visit. Cooking down cider into apple butter was reserved for farmers with more time; butchering, even with a large family to help, you simply didn't tackle that task on your own.

And yet, every one of her children attended school and graduated, and perhaps even more amazingly, all but one received a college education. I’ll just circle back to that.

During all of this World War II happened, and let’s just say, it happened to everyone. Charlotte’s oldest son applied for and received a farm deferment. Two others went off to war, and the fourth son was too young. It was at this point that one of her daughters became a nurse. I was not on the scene yet, but I’ll bet Charlotte was fit to be tied. Angry. And why not? Her family, her precious, beloved family, had gone to fight in a foreign war.

I don’t know her politics and I have no interest at all in how she voted, but I know she was a poll worker. Every Sunday found her at the piano in the local small Methodist church, all of her family arrayed in the pews. She was active in the Grange, and was there for any of her neighbors in need. She was my 4-H leader. And, there was nothing weak about Charlotte. Her family was known for men with biceps, and they got them from her.

I suppose now is the time to share my connection with Charlotte. Her daughter, who didn’t earn a college degree? She decided to stay home to raise Tommy, the lad who was an infant when his father passed. Then, she met and married my father.

Charlotte was my grandmother.

I wonder, from time to time, whatever happened to all of the toughness she possessed. Why I never got that much of it, in other words. But I did receive something that I believe, no other grandchild of hers did, because my mother and dad were involved in a serious auto accident. My mother was hospitalized some distance away, my father stayed with her, and my grandmother moved in with my brother and me. I was a tenth grader.

During that time, I got to know her like, I seriously doubt, anyone else from my generation did. She sat me down at the dining room table and she told me, how things were. I mean, how they really were. I had no idea there was anyone at all in the world like her, and I truly, truly doubt there is today. I had no idea she understood words like those she used, and she used them on me.

My grandmother could have run the entire world, and had she, things would have been a whole lot better for everyone.

But she didn’t.

To this very moment of this very day, Charlotte remains my number one favorite person of all time. Surely there must have been others like her, but I’ve never met any of them. No one else deserves my total respect. She did.

During one of the many family reunions we used to have, my Uncle Joe was reminiscing about being raised by Charlotte. I remarked that it must have been tough without a father. He stopped, looked me in the eye, and replied, “Mother was the only one.”

I do have moments, as my own age advances, of true weakness. I think about the future and what it holds, specifically, for me. Sometimes, it doesn’t look very bright.

Then, out of the roiling white fog of my memory, steps Charlotte.

“What the hell are you thinking?”

And of course, I listen.

She is, the Only One.

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