Heart Earth by Ivan Doig

Author:Ivan Doig
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 9780792719175
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 1993-01-01T10:00:00+00:00

My grandmother could hmpf like a member of royalty. She is hmpfing in a major way to my mother, although not at my mother; Grandma's range of fire simply tends to take in the entire vicinity.

"At least I got letters from you, dear. I haven't heard from Wallace and Paul in ages, darn their hides."

Like her, I can't imagine why a mere war keeps them from writing. Here I am at not quite six, same age as the war, and already I am matchless on this matter of correspondence. Isn't my Christmas greeting of merry dive-bombers here on Grandma's kitchen wall as though it were by Michelangelo? How natural it comes, hmpf-proof artistry, when you are the first grandchild and so far the only.

My mother has been shrewd enough to bring me along handy at her side on this diplomatic mission to her own mother. This is not as supple a scene for her as exterminating with Winona. Our first after-Arizona visit to Grandma carries complications that extend back to the Moss Agate years, where this grayhaired much-done-to woman provided my mother with that peculiar girlhood, threadbare and coddled, and now there's a deal more to come which my mother dreads to have to tell.

Say this for the situation, my grandmother never takes long to sort out to you what's on her mind. Rapidfire, she deems our visit tardy (we have been back from Arizona whole weeks) and assigns the logical reason (my father). She is also snorty that this call of ours is going to be so abbreviated (overnight). Her points made, she proceeds to flood us in fresh-baked cinnamon rolls, oatmeal cookies, and all other kinds of doting.

Between pastry feasts we each furnish Grandma our versions of Arizona. Mine is heavier on cactus than my mother's. Both women are tanking up on coffee, and I am intrigued that Grandma cuts hers with cold water dippered from the sink bucket. I negotiate for a sip—a sipe, Grandma's way of saying it—just to confirm that coffee in this diluted fashion is as awful as it figures to be. It is.

Maybe watered coffee sums up my grandmother's lot. Compared with even my parents, who were not exactly at the head of the caste parade, my grandmother's existence was just this side of the poorhouse. It had been that way from Moss Agate where, with at least a roof over their heads, the Ringers maybe had not been penniless but there were plenty of times when they were dollar-less. My grandmother ever after referred to any item that reminded her of Moss Agate as "old junk," which in fact was pretty much what the life there had consisted of—junk cows, a junk ranch. It wouldn't have taken much for society to consider the Ringer family itself junk. True, this grandmother of mine and even my grandfather had fended greatly better as community members than their economics suggested. My grandmother, only a third-grade education to her name, served on the school board so

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