Tag: 1940’s

The Burden Of Strength

Today while I was in my car waiting for the light to change, I saw a young woman struggling carrying an enamel bed headboard under one arm and the footboard under the other, sometimes switching it to her shoulders as she walked along the street. Just watching her struggle just for those few minutes moved me and made me think about how hard a woman’s life sometimes can be. When we find ourselves alone, women most often find solutions and we persevere no matter how hard the challenge, or stress on our lives and bodies. 

I remember my grandmother who while raising her 10 children on a daily basis cooked for her entire family as well as the farmhands. As if that wasn’t enough, she made all of the clothes for her children, fed the chickens, planted and tended the vegetable garden, and gathered fresh eggs for morning breakfast. 

She baked and cooked everything from scratch in her kitchen on a coal stove that she had to keep fired.

 She used to scrub the wash on a washboard, stirred a hot cauldron of soapy water to get them clean and ironed the clothes with a heavy sad iron. She needed at least two irons on the go together for an effective system: one in use, and one re-heating. I remember the sound of the sizzle when she sprinkled a few drops of water on it to see if it was hot enough. 

Through it all, my dear grandmother managed to have a smile on her face all day long. No wonder she and many other women of her era died in their fifties and sixties. 

 For too long we woman have a hard time sometimes saying ‘no’ to what is believed to be ‘our jobs’ as over- worked-solution-solving caretakers.  

 Now I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. Our families benefit from who we innately are and can do. I have to be honest with myself, although I am two generations away from my grandmother, I am guilty as charged and I’m not too sure I can ever change. It’s become too much a part of my DNA. 

How about you? Does the shoe fit? 

Copyright©Sandra Hart.    All Rights Reserved

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 DANCING AT THE LOTUS

  

She heard the sounds of the piano stridently rising above the restaurant chatter and began to squirm in her seat. Whenever the music started it was hard to sit still. She looked at her parents busy with their menus, then over to her brother who was attempting to make a paper airplane from a cocktail napkin and slowly slid off her seat and ran toward the dance floor. 

 She loved music and the sound always made her want to move and swirl and swing around the floor with her arms open wide. She couldn’t help it. Something inside of her four-year old self just made her do it because it was fun and made her happier than hugging the cat or eating ice cream. Swinging and dancing and moving to the music until she was dizzy was out of her control. It was just what she loved to do on Sunday afternoons at The Lotus.

It was 1943 in Washington, D.C.. The Lotus restaurant was popular among military and government personnel during the war years. The Washington Daily News called it “a sort of a poor man’s Stork Club where the average Joe can put on a dog without pulling more than a five spot out of his billfold.” 

The restaurant occupied the top level of a two-story 1926 building and her little dancing legs looked forward to those stairs each week when her family lunched at The Lotus. It was not the food for which she had visions in her head, it was the music. Most of all it was the music that made her love those stairs.

In movies of the 1930s and 1940s, supper clubs were portrayed as places where big stars and popular bands such as Glenn Miller’s played, but far more common were the sort that hosted local musicians. Still, patrons dressed up and enjoyed a time out, dining and dancing, and maybe a floor show, without spending a fortune.

 Located in the capital, The Lotus got the best bands of the era and she got to dance out on that shiny floor with them all. Twirling in and out between the soldiers and their girls taking that last dance of leave, or when she was held in her daddy’s arms, the thrill was always there. Music was in her heart and she just had to move and be a part of the magic she felt.

This particular Sunday she had the dance floor for a few minutes all by herself and she swirled and dipped to the live music with her curls flying in the air and was just having the best of time before her father interrupted her short solo by leading her back to the table. It was also on this particular Sunday that her life could’ve gone in another direction. A talent scout from Hollywood just happened to be lunching at the Lotus that afternoon and thought that this little dancing girl should go to Hollywood for a screen test. After all Shirley Temple was a big star and he thought he saw something with the same star quality in this little curly haired girl who loved to dance. 

Her parents said politely to the Hollywood gentleman, “Thank you very much, but no.” They didn’t want their daughter to be in the movies. That was the end of that, as far as her parents were concerned, but certainly not the end of her love for music, or dancing, or just being herself. 

The author Virginia Woolf once said, “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.” 

 And so, my friends, that was my life during the war when I was four. And in the end, it turned out, I did it anyway. All by myself. My way. Written large.

Copyright Sandra Hart 2015. All rights reserved. 

  

FROM SUN TO SUN

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Life is all a matter of relativity. As a young widow with three children I thought I had at times a very hard life. But recently certain events within my family brought me to think about the two generations that came before me and my grandmother and grandfather who lived on a farm in Ohio. If I really want to be honest, comparatively, my life, even in the worst of times, was a piece of cake. And I am ashamed to think I might have had a hard row-ever.

Enduring several miscarriages, my grandparents wound up with 10 living children to take care of. So, basically, in those days, my grandmother had the care of 10 children while Grandpa did ‘manly- head-of-household’ duties.

She and my grandfather lived on a farm and not only did she make all of their clothes, she cooked for all the family and farmhands, and on top of that made fresh bread daily. I still remember the flour sticking to her broad-knuckled hands as she wiped them on her apron, cleaning them between each kneading.

She did the seemingly endless farm and family wash by scrubbing on a washboard anchored on a big galvanized wash tub and then hung the laundry out on the line propped up by a pole in the middle to keep the weight of the wet wash from dragging the clothes to the ground. In the winter the clothes would freeze dry and the freezing temperatures made the sheets whiter than white, infusing the towels and clothing with the clean smell of God’s open country air. In the summer sheets would often be laid out on the green grass allowing nature’s bleach, the chlorophyll and sun, to take out any stains. Grandma knew how to make the tools of nature work for her.

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Once the laundry was dry, folded in baskets and brought into the kitchen, Grandma would iron all of the family clothes and sheets with a heavy solid iron heated on the kitchen coal stove top that today I would be pressed to even lift once without complaining.

She planted the vegetable garden every year. I remember helping her hoe the straight rows between the beans, lettuce, and strawberries. I can still see her bending over with her stovepipe bonnet huffing and puffing going about her work. I loved helping her pick strawberries ( one for me, one for the basket) and wondered while I filled my basket how she could gather pea and bean pods by folding up the corners of her long apron to make a sack for the pods.

But, I think, looking back, the best part of the day was when Grandma would let me tag along to the chicken coop in the morning to gather eggs. She taught me how to gently remove the eggs from the nests. I still remember how warm they felt as I caressed them in my hands before placing them in her basket. Sometimes I couldn’t resist putting the warm eggs against my cheeks so that I could feel their warmth on those chilly farm mornings.

“Here chick, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick.”

I can hear her soft voice calling her chickens as she lovingly allowed her grandchild to awkwardly throw handfuls of feed on the ground and sharing my excitement at watching the chickens run and peck, peck, peck, gobbling up their day’s nutrition.

The last memories I have of her and me together, my sweet grandma, is my sitting by her bedside after school and reading her the jokes from my Weekly Reader. Her gray curly hair pulled back in a pompadour style bun, her head resting on her pillow, she would quietly laugh as though she really liked the comfort I was trying to give her. Even in what would be her last days, Grandma was still working for her family. Giving me her last ounces of love.

My grandmother and those wives and mothers of her generation are the epitome of the adage of what they say, ” From sun to sun, a woman’s work is never done.”

Love you Grandma. I haven’t worked nearly as hard as you, or been loved as deeply as you, but, all things considered, life has been good to me and your other grandchildren. I think you would be happy to know that.

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Copyright Sandra Hart 2014. All rights reserved.

Memories Lost

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I have such vivid memories of my childhood that have remained with me throughout my life. I never thought it was unusual, pondering events of a life lived, and to be honest, as a writer, I have often found a certain degree of comfort reconciling my days here through those memories. Sometimes I think it is as though our lives have been a movie in which we are the spectator.

Washington D.C. 1943…..

The bed was so big my brother and I could stretch out our arms and only our fingertips would touch.  The lights were on, but I was scared. My parents were hurrying to pull down the long dark blinds to cover the high windows in our bedroom because the sirens started to blare outside breaking the silence of evening. The noise was deafening and was coming in waves, over and over again.  

Then, when I wanted the safety of the night lights, my mother shut the switch. We were swallowed up. Darkest of darkness. My brother and I lay there in that black hole, sheets over our heads, with the sirens wailing in waves and I shook. I shook in fear of what it could be.  I had seen those awful scary pictures of war in the movies about the bombs and broken houses like ours.

My brother and I knew this was an air raid because we had been through them before, but each time our fears were real. Maybe this time. Maybe this time real bombs were coming. 

To this day, I remember the fear. I can still hear those sirens. And I still remember my relief when after the sirens stopped nothing happened to us. We weren’t dead.

In conversations I have had with my older brother throughout the years about our childhood, he remembers very little. He, for some reason, has scant recall of our lives as children. Was it so unimportant  that he walked through our past without holding on to it as I did? Or is his mathematical mind wired differently than my creative one?  I have always been highly sensitive and aware of my surroundings. Sherman always seemed absent. So smart. There, but not.

Sherman’s one standout memory of our childhood in Washingon is of when the large cement urn at the top of our outside steps crumbled and fell, pinning his leg, the inner steel stake plunging through his calf. A traumatic incident that left a permanent scar and for some reason his recollections are only made of this one terrible event. Perhaps this is Sherman’s emotional event that allowed his short term childhood memory to transfer to his long term memory.

Dr. Rudolph Tanzi, co-author of Super Brain, tells us that within our hippocampus in our brain our short term memory attaches it to something emotional so that it will transfer to long term memory. But where all of these memories are stored we don’t know. The neuroscientists don’t know either. Not yet anyway.  On the other hand, Deepak Chopra, the author and holistic/New Age guru, takes the Eastern view that they are stored in the soul.

Whichever theory you want to believe, since we really don’t know, one truth we all can agree upon is that we each store memories that are our own. So when the sirens stopped and the war was over, my brother and I got our own beds and I traveled unknowingly alone with my memories.

Sandra Hart Copyright 2014. All rights reserved

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