Grandma’s New Year’s Toss

Because they never owned a car and never learned to drive, someone made a special effort to bring Grandma and Grandpa – my father’s parents – to the celebration of my third birthday.

Generally, we traveled the thirty-five miles to their home for Sunday dinners or holiday celebrations. Why the routine was broken for this occasion I can’t say, but I cherish the snapshot: my only image of this improbable couple.

Born in Sweden, they traveled to America as strangers on the same ship in the early 1900s. After meeting and marrying in Minneapolis, they moved to Iowa, struggled through the Depression, raised six children, and delighted in their grand-children. Then, they were gone.

Loving but taciturn, Grandpa preferred time in his workshop to front porch socializing, although he welcomed the presence of grandchildren. His tools fascinated me. Along one edge of the work bench, chisels and awls marched in formation, arranged by height. Secured to a wall, saws, axes, and an adze gleamed in the faint light: rust-free and ready for work.

A small cubby held tacks, nails, and screws in assorted bottles and tins; close by the unlocked door, a cigar box contained a scattering of nickels and pennies, as well as cigarettes and matches.

In those days of penny candy, I imagined the contents of the cigar box to be a fortune. When I asked if the money was his, Grandpa smiled and said it had been left by friends who’d stopped by for a smoke. Only later did I realize the truth. Those ‘friends’ were strangers: men riding the rails; stopping off in hopes of finding a meal, a day’s work, or even a cigarette. With the nickels and pennies they left, they ensured a smoke for the next man off the rails.

Grandfather and father sharing a smoke in front of the workshop

While the men busied themselves with their tools, the women clustered on the front porch, stitching smiling radishes and dancing tomatoes across acres of cotton sacking that would be made into tea towels.

While they worked, I snapped beans, sorted thread, or wandered off to engage in a long-standing family ritual called Checking Out The Pantry. Long and narrow, lit by a single hanging bulb and lined with shelves that climbed higher than any child’s sight, that pantry was a marvel.

Jars of home-canned vegetables and fruits, jellies and jams, spiced crabapples, and a variety of pickles shimmered in the dim light. Saltines and gingersnaps nestled against cupcakes and rolls from the Omar man. Jewel Tea premiums — pie plates, pitchers, and baking dishes — shared shelf space with a footed cake plate with an aluminum cover and my favorite kitchen tool — a glass whipping bowl with a combination lid and beaters that I could lick after I finished whipping the cream. 

As children, we knew Grandma’s rule: we were to look but not touch. We rarely snitched a cookie without asking, and we never dared pick up a figurine in the living room or rearrange the colored glass bottles in the kitchen window.

But life with Grandma entailed more than ‘just looking.’ In her mind, a child with time enough to stare into a pantry was a child with time to help: especially with cleaning.

Dish-washing, dusting, and sweeping didn’t qualify as cleaning; they were part of the daily routine. Serious house-cleaning took place according to some mysterious schedule that was impossible to predict. When the spirit moved her and she declared, “Time to Clean!” the process was a wonder to behold.

Spring and autumn meant window washing, rug-beating, curtain laundering, and porch-painting. With windows thrown open to the air, the fragrance of her work wafted through the neighborhood: lavender sachets for the drawers; Spic-N-Span for linoleum floors; lemon oil for furniture, and vinegar for glass.

In winter, a different kind of cleaning took place. Between Christmas and New Year’s Day, Grandma set aside dusting and sweeping for a project terrifying in its scope.

While Grandpa fled to his workshop, Grandma went to work with a zeal that reminded my father of Sherman’s March to the Sea. She inventoried every closet, emptied and rearranged every drawer, looked under every bed, and sorted through every piece of paper and clothing in the house in search of the forgotten, the unused and the unnecessary.

“Karin Larsson at the Linen Cupboard” ~ Carl Larsson

By nature a saver, she also believed that if we hadn’t used it, looked at it, or remembered it in the past year, we didn’t need it. If we’d neglected a toy, someone else should play with it. Unused kitchen items were sent off to be newly useful in another home. Was there a knick-knack no one enjoyed? It might bring joy to someone else.

Granted, her definitions of ‘useful’ and ‘necessary’ were remarkably elastic. More William Morris than Marie Kondo, she lived by Morris’s dictum that a home should contain nothing not known to be useful, or believed to be beautiful.

Boxes of rarely viewed photographs, letters written during the wars, greeting cards from grandchildren, and postcards from friends in the old country always were saved. Worn towels, outgrown clothing, lace trim from worn bed linens and fabric scraps were saved to be transformed into quilts or rugs. The enormous roasting pan stayed. Wooden barrels stayed. Buttons and bias tape stayed.

But unclaimed dishes from a year’s worth of church dinners? Costumes for dolls that had been broken or given away? Unread magazines? Outgrown shoes or broken mirrors? Their fate was sealed.

In the end, whatever was tossed or given away, Grandma entered each New Year knowing precisely what her house contained, and precisely where to find it.

Looking back, I’m not surprised the family rolled its collective eyes when the annual battle with clutter began. But Grandma held to her ritual, and since I was available during Christmas vacation, she often pressed me into service.

We spent hours working together: shoving and carrying, lifting and rearranging. The labor could be tedious, and there were times when I became frustrated by hours spent working rather than playing, but when we were done I felt a bit lighter myself, as though all that excess, all those unnecessary accretions, had been a burden pressing down on my own young life.

And that, I suspect, was her point. In the end, the unnecessary and the unwanted turn out to be burdens, and it’s always best to enter the New Year with as few burdens as possible. 

With the beginning of each new year, memories of my grandmother and her routine never fail to surface. For years those memories have caused me to do my own cleaning of closets and drawers: looking things over, sorting them out, making decisions with a certain sense of urgency, as though Grandma herself might step through the door, ready to judge my efforts.

Each year, with so much sorting and dispersing already behind me, household clutter is less of an issue, but the ritual endures. As I work, I occasionally ponder a new possibility: what would happen if we approached life itself as Grandma approached her house? What if her lessons about dealing with the unnecessary, the useless, and the unwanted have broader application?

Like most people, I have a lifetime of preconceptions accumulated in the corners of my mind. There are a few prejudices that could stand a good sorting, not to mention a few irrationalities. Tendrils of laziness could stand to be pruned, and small grudges that litter my life like crumbs on a carpet would sweep up easily enough once I began. If a light film of anger dims the world’s light, only a little effort might wipe it away: only a bit of will, and a little energy.

Standing at the end of one year and looking toward another through my grandmother’s eyes, I already feel lighter. It’s good to clean house.

 

Comments always are welcome.