Routines - a Halloween story

She was born in 1890 on the day her mother died and she was so tiny her grandparents placed her on a bed of cotton in a cigar box in their kitchen cook stove. Her father, devastated by his wife's death abandoned both her and her brother in his parent's care and left.

No one expected her to live, even healthy big babies died back then. She did live, though, and both she and her brother were raised by grim Victorian grandparents who neither wanted, nor could afford them.

She had a dolly that she rocked in a little rocking chair until she was six years old when  her grandparents took that away from her because she was too old and gave her a thimble for her birthday. It was time for her to put away childish things and begin the routines and duties of a female in the late eighteen hundreds. The horror of seeing her doll burned in the same cook stove that had saved her life never left her.

Hemming hankies and sheets, making biscuits and learning to keep house made school seem like a holiday, but she was not good at her lessons. When her period started during class and embarrassed her by ruining her white dress, she was taken out of school for good. Life settled into the routine of cleaning house, cooking, the occasional taffy pull with church friends and her grandfather's whip whenever she stepped the least little bit out of line.

It is not surprising that when she met my great uncle, the family bad boy, and he paid attention to her, she fell madly in love. His parents, my great grandparents were not happy about this. They envisioned a better match for their bright, but mischievous son, so it wasn't until his 21st. birthday that he sneaked her out of the house and onto a train bound for St. Louis.

In between picking her up and boarding the train, they were married. He in his best Sunday clothes. She also in hers, but with a brand new pair of shoes she had managed to buy and hide away for just this occasion. Size two heels the shoe store had bought as samples for their window. New shoes for special occasions became one of her life long routines. Dutifully married and feeling quite pleased with themselves they boarded the train only to find his mother sitting there waiting for them!

Instead of going to St. Louis they went back to her house where they lived the rest of their lives. He driving a truck for, or working in the family business. She working in the hospital nursery caring for new born infants. It wasn't a bad life. They had their routines like on Friday night when they would walk downtown to the show and buy a nickel beer. The family was slightly horrified, but it wasn't forbidden.
 
Both of them loved children, but they were never blessed with their own and adoption was frowned upon by her new family. And so it was that a new routine was started. She was the one called on to stay with her new sister-in-law during her lying in and since they all lived in the Big house together, she continued to love and care for those children as they grew up.

Later she was called upon to do the same with the children of those children, (me) and finally with me and my children. Of course she didn't live with any of us, but she came and rocked the babies, played with the toddlers and watched over the older children as if they were her own. It was a routine that spanned over sixty years.

Sixty years uniting a family with tales of her own childhood and the childhoods of all the children she had loved and cared for. Sixty years of changing diapers, playing school and penny poker on the library rug. Sixty years of telling real ghost stories that tingled and terrified -- until she herself joined that ghostly specter who had rescued her from Victorian grandparents when she wasn't much more than a child herself.