One of my earliest childhood memories is of sitting on the drainboard by the kitchen sink at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Grandma was giving me a bath. Her gentle hands lathered me all over with a washcloth that was so full of Ivory soap suds that I could have slipped right through her hands — but I didn’t. Grandma was humming as she washed me and she smelled so good — later I recognized that scent as April Showers talcum powder.
As I grew up, visits to Quentin were a regular part of life. Like Tom, Larry and Sue, Sylvia and I stayed with Grandpa on choir practice evenings. Our father Harold was the organist at the Cornwall Methodist Church and Mother and Grandma sang in the choir. Our other grandmother (Elizabeth Light) and Grandma Boyer sat together in the alto section. They were two very respected women in the church and quite the picture of refinement. But they could get the giggles. Grandma Light told me many times the story of a Sunday when something in the service struck the two of them as funny. Sitting there in front of the church, they smiled and caught each other’s eye, then quickly looked away and valiantly tried to keep their composure. Beneath their choir gowns, their bellies were jiggling in silent laughter as they fought the impulse to laugh out loud. They would just get themselves under control, and then one would feel the bench shaking again as the other one dissolved into soundless giggles. “Oh, how we laughed about that later,” Grandma Light would say.
Music was a lovely thread in Grandma Boyer’s life. She could read music, sing and play the piano. I can picture her at the piano in the living room playing hymns, and the room full of Boyers singing in four-part harmony. I never had to learn how to harmonize — it came from hearing those harmonies, even in the womb. Besides hymns, Grandma played pieces she had learned as a young woman in Harrisburg when she had a job accompanying the silent movies. “Humoresque” is the one I remember. But she knew many more, a variety of tunes to go with battles, heroes, villans and romantic interludes.
I also remember a taffy pull Grandma set up in the kitchen. I was too little to do the pulling, but I did enjoy the creamy feel and taste of the warm taffy in my mouth.
Grandma had big brown eyes and long, dark hair that was so beautiful. When I was little, she generally wore her hair swept up in the style of the 40s. Mother told me she would bring in rainwater to wash her hair, from the barrel where it was collected at a rainspout at the back of the house. She said that rainwater left your hair soft and shiny.
For most of my life the summer kitchen was a storage room, and I don’t really know its functioning in its prime. But I do have in my memory what would be a wonderful painting of Grandma, standing in the summer kitchen doing the laundry at the Maytag wringer washer. She fed the soapy wash between two smooth rollers to wring out the suds before they went into the rinse tub, then sent the clothes through the rollers a second time to wring out the rinse water before she hung the wash on the line. With her big family, Grandma spent a lot of time on laundry. One time she got her arm caught in the wringer and had a nasty injury to the skin on that arm. Years later I helped Grandma Light with her wringer washer and was always careful to keep my hands away from those rollers.
Also in the summer kitchen was a huge cardboard box that Grandma had filled with dress-up clothes. I remember playing a make-believe game about a queen. The queen got to wear the patent leather pumps, sat on the bed and ordered everyone else around. The cast would change depending on which of us grandchildren were there. The bottom step of the staircase that went upstairs doubled as a secret toy box. The step was a hinged lid that opened up and there were toys inside.
The upstairs originally consisted of three bedrooms off of an open space at the top of the steps. It was a storage place and there was a treadle sewing machine set up. There was no indoor bathroom like we had at home. You went to an outhouse at the end of the long sidewalk in the back yard. In summer, the outhouse could be warm and sunny with bugs flying or crawling around the top, but cold and dark on a fall or winter evening. Take a flashlight! For night-time use, there was a white enamel chamber pot at the top of the stairs. It was carried down to the outhouse and emptied in the morning. One day when we went to visit, Grandpa and a couple of his sons were making a lot of noise and commotion upstairs. As we found out, they were turning the space at the top of the stairs into a bathroom. What a major event!
The upstairs was unheated. The stairway door was kept closed to keep the heat in the downstairs. Mother often told of how she and her two sisters slept in the attic when the brothers came along. They would get into their nightgowns downstairs behind the warm stove in the kitchen. Then they would run up two flights of stairs and quick jump into bed under thick comforters. The three of them would keep each other warm until morning when, again, they would grab their clothes and run back down to the warm kitchen to dress for the day.
When we stayed overnight, I especially remember sleeping in the front bedroom toward the alley. As a child, and even as a young adult, there was something special about staying overnight at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Snuggled deep under the heavy old comforters in winter, you could hear the voices of adults downstairs and the big Bendix clock ticking away in Grandma and Grandpa’s bedroom. You might smell chocolate, because Grandpa often stored the boxes of candy he was making for gifts in the bureau drawers in that room. In the morning my wake-up call was not from people, but from the mourning doves that nested right outside the window. “Oo-ka doo-doo-doo.” We’d go downstairs where Grandma was busy at the sink or stove. She’d fix us cereal. Later a grumpy Grandpa would tromp down the steps. “Good morning, Grandpa,” we’d say. “What’s good about it?” he’d growl. Then he’d have his coffee and gradually his world would begin to brighten up. I now know that process myself. Don’t ask me any questions until I’ve had my morning coffee. Grandpa would often call it his “cup of joe.”
Sometimes when I’d come to visit, Grandpa would take me over to the kitchen cupboard and get me a big gumdrop from a little white bag. I would only get one, because he bought them for Grandma.
I remember when the coal truck would pull up in the alley beside the house. The driver would get out and position a metal chute from the truck to the cellar window to deliver coal for the furnace. That was quite an event for us children to see the coal come shooting down the slide with a deafening rattle and a big cloud of dust.
Also along the side alley near the front of the house there were grapes growing. I would stand and pick and eat them one at a time, squeezing the slippery inside into my mouth first. The inside was tart but the skin was sweet.
Beside the front porch in front of the living room windows were beautiful hydrangea bushes with bluish-purple blooms the size of cauliflowers. I remember hearing that they were “Grandma’s hydrangeas.” I was not sure what that meant, but I was impressed to the point where today I’d like to have “my own” hydrangea bushes.
Just beyond the back porch to the left was a water pump. I remember when I was very young trying to get the water to come by pumping the handle up and down. There was also a pump in the front yard of a neighbor across the street. Mother said that it was a community pump in the years before people had their own water supply.
My father said that “Mother Boyer” could make the simplest offering of food or drink irresistible: “Would you like a nice cold glass of water?”
Harry Sechrist was a long-time friend of Grandpa’s. I guess they worked together in the ore mines at Cornwall. When they lost their jobs during the Depression, they drove down to Baltimore once a week and bought as much produce as they could, brought it back and peddled it out of a car around town the rest of the week. When I was a child, Harry still peddled fruits and vegetables from what I would call a bakery truck. You could walk up a few steps into an open space with wooden trays on either side, displaying his wares. I don’t remember much about the fruits and vegetables or what Grandpa bought. I always had my eye on the candy he kept in a container at the top of the steps. I would wait for him to ask me if I’d like a piece, and of course, “yes.” The other memorable part of Harry’s stops at Grandpa’s was that the two men would chat for a long while in Pennsylvania Dutch. Grandpa grew up in a home where Pa. Dutch was the first language. When he married Grandma, she didn’t speak or understand it, so it was not the common language in their home. In fact, when Grandpa did speak Dutch to someone, like his mother “Mam” who lived with them for some years, Grandma felt excluded. So Grandpa needed to be careful on that count. But he did often speak to his sister and brothers on the phone in Dutch. None of the children or grandchildren learned to speak Pa. Dutch, as was the case in many families at that time.
For me, going to Grandma and Grandpa’s house was always a wonderful experience. Whether it was just me or many grandchildren at a time, we would always be enveloped by love and acceptance. We learned to appreciate and respect the family members of older generations. My parents never spoke ill of my grandparents in our hearing and vice versa.
In the evening, I especially loved lying on the sofa in the living room with the lights out and the curtain drawn between the living room and kitchen. The adults would be in the kitchen talking. Maybe Mother encouraged us to go and lie down if it was late on a school night, I don’t remember. I never listened to what the adults were saying, but their voices were like a lullaby as I drifted off to sleep. For many years of my life, the image of sleeping on that sofa, lights out, voices in the kitchen, was a comfort place in my mind. I would automatically go there when I felt uneasy or insecure in my own world.
If it was a big family gathering, there was also a predictable pleading from the cousins when it was time to leave, begging for a sleepover at one house or another. Sometimes we got our wish!
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How tragic when we learned that life as it had always been could be so drastically changed by a mental illness that neither Grandma nor Grandpa caused or could remedy. As Grandma’s illness developed, Grandpa’s thoughts of the two of them doing some traveling once he retired were quietly put away. This was in the 1950s, when our family had moved to New Jersey. I was about 8. Trips back to Pennsylvania began to include visits with Grandma at Wernersville State Hospital and later, Philhaven in Mount Gretna. The doctors tried to find a way to balance Grandma’s mood swings between manic activity and depression. As Tom mentioned in his memories, the medication that finally gave her some relief also caused continual jerking movements of her head and arm. It became difficult for her to eat or write, and was so embarrassing for her. She could no longer hold the babies and give them warm, soapy baths in the sink or rock them, singing in that soft buzzing voice that she used only for the babies.
Grandpa’s role became one of caretaker. I do remember seeing pictures of a trip he made to Maine with Joan and Al. Is that correct? But he was loathe to leave his true love, his “Almo.” As his eyesight worsened, Grandma would come to be his vision, and he would do most of the shopping and cooking. Toward the end of their lives, they had a sweet rhythm. Grandma would get up early and come down and start the coffee brewing. Grandpa would sleep late, come downstairs grumpy until he had some coffee. They would spend the day together, and often there would be a visit from one or more of Paul’s family, Aunt Ethel or others. Grandma would go to bed early in the evening, and Grandpa would stay up late, often listening to a favorite program on the radio, maybe a Phillies baseball game. As his children asked him to tell the story of his life, he would use those late hours to write, and later, as his eyesight grew poor, dictate into a tape recorder. What a treasure those stories, poems and songs are for us.
