Margotlog: What My Cousin Said

Margotlog: What My Cousin Said

Let's call the oldest of my North Dakota cousins "Ellen." It's not her real name but Ellen captures her gentle though furiously active spirit. Four years older than I, Ellen knew our grandmother, Augusta. We're been talking by phone--she at "the cabin" touching the North Dakota border, I upstairs on the third floor of my St. Paul house, with the spruce spire ascending across the front windows, and the maple brushing the back with its soothing fingers. It's the end of summer, and windows elsewhere in the house are open. I can hear the wind.

As Ellena and I talk, I'm kneeling on the landing of the third-floor. We were going to meet at "the cabin" but my car didn't cooperate. Thus, this call, weeks after we intended to see each other. Her voice is so distinctive I feel as if I could reach through the phone and touch it--it has a slight prairie twang, and the words come rapidly. Ellen has raised three children and now has (can this be right?) fifteen grandchildren? Her life is full of family; mine hardly at all, though there is family to be had. It's just mostly by association with Fran, my husband. His grandchildren occupy much of his free time, almost none of mine.

Instead I find myself occupied by the past, especially prominent on this third floor, with my grandmother Augusta's painted bureau which is very hard to open, as if the old wood resisted any attempt to delve into its interior. I have to pull very hard to unstick a drawer. The interior shelves in the top half, hide behind two engraved doors, which rattle as I struggle to pull them apart. Inside is a swatch of emboidered satin, pale taupe with green, gold, and touches of autumn leaves. Also folders of old photographs, and the packet of letters August wrote to my mother during her last year at the University of Minnesota, 1928-9.

Ellen and I have launched into a discussion of our grandfather's death--Papa Max. If I remember correctly, he died in his late 80s, after living alone in the big house "in town" for at least a decade. It was during that time that I came to know him, the old man with the ring of white hair around his reddish pate, the bright blue eyes, the thick fingers with thick nails, and his paunch covered by a black vest, often slightly soiled . He seemed to have no harm in him. When he fed his canary Sweetie Pie little bits of toast, she twittered, and he spoke to her in German. Then he seemed like a benign ancient tree, part of the family landscape, still upright, still making low music with what was left of his life.

What Ellen said concerned his funeral which was held "at the lake." The lake, small in this case, was named after the wife of perhaps a town founder. Lake Elsie. What a pleasant lake to live beside in the "old Hankinson" house, built by the early entrepreneur who'd brought the railroad to the town that held his name. My uncle and aunt, Ellen's parents, had moved out of town to the lake, and into this truly grand house with polished walnut everywhere--it created the essence of the interior; whereas, turrets and small and large porches defined the exterior facade.

I wasn't there for the funeral. Only my mother attended from our family, after all so very far away in South Carolina. But my mother's twin brother Buddy and his wife Leona, and their four children certainly did attend. The funeral took place in their house. Buddy, by this time, looked like a younger version of Papa Max--stout and short, with a ring of white hair around his head and dancing, or snapping blue eyes. He had given up college, I was to learn years later, in order to take care of their mother. I would need even more years to to understand why.

Uncle Buddy and his family had prospered. Clearly they had far more wealth than we did, or so it would appear to me when my sister and I visited. My mother often mentioned trying to make do "on a professor's salary," meaning my father, though he worked hard, wasn't getting rich.