I was amused at the moving of the desks at your house. I can imagine that the entire change in set-up is getting on Jim's nerves. In a case I know of, where a wife died, the husband moved in with his son, but in a small comfortable house in the same yard. He cooked his two meals daily and ate one big meal with them. That way they all lived the privacy of their own lives. It can be nerve-wracking to have that privacy disrupted. I'm sure your husband was only giving vent to pent-up emotions at the radical change of affairs, at an age when quiet means a good deal to a person.
We, too, have a brand new grandbaby, a March baby, if you please. Did you know March babies are supposedly smarter than any other month's? This new one is our oldest son's third little son. -- Betty Glad, Missouri.
March Babies Bright
Sure, March babies are bright! Didn't our Ernie become valedictorian at Illinois, top guy in a graduating class of about 1200? But of couse September, January and April babies are pretty smart, too, for Ruth, Wilbert and Joe did almost as well . . . they say February babies are likely to be the most renowned, and in our big family we didn't have ary a February child till the boys both married February girls, and now Tim is a February, too. I dare say he will be president or a second Longfellow, or something in due time!
That plan of a separate house would be excellent in many cases, especially where the widower was comparatively young and able bodied, and where the son had a family still at home or a wife with poor health. In our case it really works out very well. No, it wasn't nerves, he doesn't have them. It was just Jim's perennial habit of teasing me about the frailties of womankind. He and his father are very congenial and similar in temperament and habits. Grandfather is well for his age, but hardly well enough to "do" for himself, even two meals a day. The biggest drawback about living here is that he has to climb stairs, for we have no first-floor bedroom. With our children all away, there is no complication. With reasonable health and freedom from other anxieties, most any household with two generations, especially if adult can make a stab at harmony; but where three generations try to live under one roof, especially with one of them 'teen age, there is a chance for plenty of friction.
Hope's Family Story
As to my people, we lived in Urbana, Ill., when we children were growing up, though five of the six of us were born in Nebraska when the folks homesteaded out there in the '90's. After coming back to their home town, Neoga, Ill., for a few years, they moved to the university town, where there was plenty of building going on, as my father was a carpenter and contractor. It was not only a good location for his trade, but a good place for a family to live, and he could send all to college there cheaper than sending us away. All six of us are married now and there are about 20 grandchildren on that side and, let me see, seven great grandchildren.
My father passed away very suddenly from cerebral hemorrhage on the morning of June 17, 1940, the day France fell. It happened that I was on jury duty in Chicago at the time, and all day our group discussed the war situation and the tragedy of France, and it was not till the end of the day when I went back to the hotel that I learned of the other tragedy. It was dark by the time I reached home and until I walked up on to the front porch I was in a daze, but then in the dark of the summer evening I could feel or see the gentle motion of the big porch swing in the breeze, the swing he built, the swing he sat in so many pleasant hours, where we children and our children used to cuddle up to him and visit. That is when the realization swept over me that he was gone.
To this day, when I am there and hear that special squeak of the springs, or through the big window see the corner of the swing in gentle motion, there is a sharp pang at the knowledge that it is only the wind and not he, there just out of sight in the old familiar place. He was strong as an oak, a bulwark of strength to us all, so calm and dependable and gentle. None of us could believe that one so rugged couldn't outlive our small and dainty mother. She could believe it least of all, and never recovered from the shock. Three years later she, too, left us. The day word came that the end was near for her, I was at the far end of the state at Ruth's. It was mid-afternoon by the time the visiting nieces and I got started to Urbana. Shocked and anxious, we could talk of nothing but our mother and grandmother. After a few minutes silence fell, and then one of the girls said softly, "did you notice that we all suddenly began saying 'she was' instead of 'she is,' as though she is already dead?" and sure enough by the time we reached home, we found she must have died at just about that time.
She was my ideal of the perfect lady. I never knew her to do a selfish, unkind or discourteous thing, nor to shirk a duty. She ruled by kindness, and she was in the finest sense a queen. And as for brains and talents, she had them in near-genious quality, but all that was diverted into raising her family. Even when her children were through college and working on their master's degrees, they would call to her to spell or define a word, it was so much quicker than using the encyclopedia. Her definitions were more concise and lucid than the dictionary itself, and we would trust her spellings and her pronunciations against the world. Our brother, the only boy in the family of six, the best brother one could have, had passed away in California from coronary thrombosis just three weeks before our mother's death, a great shock. We never told her but she seemed to sense it, they said, just before she died.
We were all struck by the coincidence, a little later in going through some family snapshots, that these three, the first of our big family to go, were caught together in a curious unworldly scene on the shores of the Pacific when the folks visited him a year or two before. Just those three, with foreground and background misted out with spray, standing together and looking with quiet but unfathomable expression out into the distance, almost as though they had heard some strange melody and had turned together to see something out beyond our ordinary time and space. -- Hope.