Irene said she'd learned the song "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long
ways from home." She was singing it and not really thinking about the words. Her
mother, of course, had died when she was four. She sang it in front of her Grandma
Howe, who was the mother of her mother. Grandma Howe asked her to stop singing it,
apparently because it was too emotionally painful.
She always told me that she'd started doing dishes for the family when she was
'a big girl five years old'. Apparently, that's what they'd told her. She would
have lost her mother by this time and this was part of making her way in the world.
She told a story about how when her mother, Elsie, was dying, and Elsie gave Irene
her rings to play with. Irene lost them through the crack between the boards in the
floor. Her mother said, 'Don't worry about it.' I guess they had worse things to
worry about right then. I have no idea if the rings were ever found.
About the time of Irene and Jack's fiftieth wedding anniversary, I happened to
step into the house and overhear a conversation. They didn't know I'd overheard
and I never mentioned it to them. Jack told Irene something she'd never known: that
his parents had sat deathwatch the night that her mother had died.
Deathwatch was sitting with a dying person so that they and their family had someone there. I'm sure they were doing nursing duties as well. It was a common practice back before hospitals were available everywhere.
Jack's parents (Lulan & Jimmy Chisholm) lived on the same road and less than a mile from Elsie & Charlie Whitfield (and Elsie's parents, the J.E. Howe's), so they were near neighbors.
She told me that her Grandma Howe had told her a story about the importance of wearing underwear. When Grandma Howe had been young, she hadn't owned any bloomers. She loved to go on the swing, but had to tuck her skirts around her very, very carefully so that they wouldn't blow up from the wind from the swing. She'd been glad to get underpants to wear later on.
Irene was always getting her grandmother (I don't remember which one) to sing for her. But her grandmother would not sing for anyone else. One day Irene asked her to sing just as the local minister was coming up the walk and the minister heard her singing and wanted to know if she'd be in the choir. The grandmother was mad at Irene and wouldn't sing for her after that.
Irene's Howe uncles sometimes got called the 'Katzenjammer Kids' (after the comic strip)
because they were always up to mischief. Ray and Millard in particular were the names
I always heard of as being up to stuff. (Though some of the others got into things,
too, I think.) One story was how they ran someone's gate up a flagpole. Another one,
a favorite story of mine, was how they had disassembled someone's buggy, carted all the
pieces to the church roof and then reassembled it. Naturally no one could figure out
how they'd gotten the buggy onto the church roof.
Millard was a 'powder monkey', which means he was using dynamite. One thing he was
known for was using way too much 'powder' so he could blow the stumps clear across the
river.
