Maybe Grammy strode into my dream. Maybe one more time she grabbed me by the arm, dug her knuckles into my shoulder and said, ‘Don’t try any of those little-girl tricks with me, young lady. You want something done, you figure out how to do it yourself. You make something of yourself.’
In any case, I woke up in the middle of the night with the answer. I sat up in bed for a long time, staring and wondering if it was as good as it seemed.
I walked downstairs, stoked up the fire in the wood stove, and paced back and forth in front of it.
‘I think I’ll be a midwife,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m going to be a midwife,’ I said aloud.
I knew it was right, although not by reasoning – I was a long way from being rational about my future. After all, I had already gone to college, I had a decent job, one that had earned me enough to make payments on my very own tiny farmhouse. On weekends and evenings over the past three years, I’d knocked down the old warped interior walls and nailed up used barn boards; I’d brought in Vermont slate so the kitchen floor would look like the tide pools at Boothbay. I’d been to the dump and collected old bottles and set them on a dish rail. I’d bought my plates from my neighbor the potter and hung pots and pans from a rack made by my friend the blacksmith. I was at a point where I could serve a meal for friends.
Neither was my midwifery idea fashionable. I had my dream in 1974, and people didn’t aspire to being midwives then. Widows in 19th-century novels did, a few leftover hippies maybe. People would think I’d been reading an unexpurgated version of the Whole Earth Catalogue.
But I’d met somebody recently who was a midwife and I’d been thinking about the idea. And besides, when I was in high school, I would wait until after everyone went to bed and then I’d crawl out the window, sneak out to the car, let it roll down the driveway, start it up and drive to the emergency ward of the local hospital so I could watch medical dramas. That must have meant something.
‘Of course,’ I said to myself, ‘“The Squire of Brentwood” proves it.’ That was a paper I wrote in High School. We had sheep at home then (the Squire was a most prolific ram), and I wrote a paper in my English class about how I couldn’t concentrate on writing a paper because I’d been up all night with my arm inside a sheep’s uterus. ‘All activities pale’ – I remembered writing something grandiose like that – ‘when compared to the excitement of the maternity ward.’
The heart of it was, though, that being a midwife went along with everything I believed in. If I became a midwife, I could help give other families a start towards being like mine had been.
In other words, it came out of Nana’s kitchen.
Nana’s kitchen was the way things were supposed to be. It had Nana’s lap. It also had a rocking chair, a Seth Thomas clock, and it hummed with the lives of women who bustled, scrubbed, patted, mended and arranged. Women whose entire lives were concerned with their homes, husbands, children, family, friends and neighbors.
Nana and Pappy had started with nothing but their youth and Yankee values. In the winters, Pappy worked in the Maine woods, sleeping with eleven men on one long straw mattress, and in summers he hired out on farms until he had enough money to buy the land on Westford Hill, Hodgdon Corners, Aroostook County, Maine. The original white frame farmhouse, with its kitchen, parlour and two upstairs bedrooms, went up in 1912. My mom was born there; so were her brother and sister. I was there the night my brother was born in 1948.
In Nana’s kitchen I learnt about woman’s work. Nana taught me to garden, cook, bake and preserve. On long summer afternoons, with aunts, she-cousins and neighbors all moving softly about, bumping plump, pasty arms, I learnt the rich satisfaction of tiering pears and peaches in mason jars; I came to savour the sweet steam rising from the pots; and wandering away from the edges of industry, I developed an affection for the piles of pits and peelings whose colors grew deeper and darker throughout the sweltering afternoons.
The women were sinking values into my bones. Not with their words, but with the smell of bubbling butter, brown sugar and cinnamon; the rhythm of fingers turning and flying across a pie crust; the sound of their voices moving in and out of the sound of their work; the room underfoot and on step stools they made for me. I became like them, before words, before thought.
Nana formed me with abundant and unconditional love. At the kitchen table, she’d show me how to cut out and sew pyjamas with one snap in the front for my dolls, and while we worked she’d say over and over again, ‘You can get yourself into any trouble whatsoever, young lady, go ahead and try. It won’t make any difference. I’ll love you and you can’t help yourself.’
Fortunately for my patients today, my mother’s ideas about responsibility more than balanced Nana’s breakaway heart. Mother was interested in standards – stern ones, ones that did not give way to stories, excuses, or extenuating circumstances. When I did something wrong, she sent me directly to my room, where I could concentrate, undisturbed and uncomforted, about my misdeed. Gradually I understood that responsibility is absolute and personal; that there’s no shrugging it off when things become difficult.
If there had just been Nana, I would probably be a plump, contented farm wife today. But I had Grammy. Grammy was my great-grandmother on my dad’s side. Grammy, the woman who raised my father, had no interest in punch and cookies.
Grammy smoked a pipe, spit, wore rouge and bangled ear-rings and sang dirty ditties. She ranted and raged at the whole pissant, goddam mean world. She was massive. Her breasts were so big and so undisciplined that she had to hold them up with one forearm in order to get her belt buckled underneath. I thought she was spectacular.
We have one old brown photo of Grammy as a young woman. There’s a log cabin sitting no-nonsense in the middle of the picture. Grammy’s young family is lined up in front of it. Miserable, cold-looking leaves are straying all over the ground. Another bleak November in the Maine woods; nothing to look forward to but five months of life-threatening cold.
Grammy’s husband is over to the right. Although he must have been a fairly young man, his shoulders had already eroded. He had his pants hitched up and cinched. He didn’t exactly glare at the photographer, but it’s no smile either. Posing for the picture was clearly only one more miserable activity in his scabby, itchy, cold, dirty and mean lifetime. Must be his 30-30 leaned up against the wall of the cabin.
A step or two away from him is Grammy. An Amazon. Her hair is drawn up high in a knot; her dress is a fortress, seamed with rivets from shoulder to ground. For the purposes of the picture, she’d set the butt of her gun firmly on the ground and rested her hand ever so comfortably on its barrel.
One of the little girls standing near Grammy would be my father’s mother – but it wasn’t she who raised my father. For involved reasons, Grammy did that.
I loved Grammy. I was absolutely fascinated by her. Grammy – crude, tough and vulgar – was a midwife.