Memories
Ninety years ago today, in South St. Paul, in this little house, my mother was born during a Minnesota blizzard. They couldn't get her mother to the hospital so her father ran to his parents home to get his sister Elizabeth, who was a nurse, and she delivered Mom.
Interesting thing about that little house that Grandpa built is that there was a trap door that went directly into the little barn below where the animals were kept. The little house was built on a hill and the barn was dug out of the hill under the house.
Later, Grandpa would build the 'big house' as it was called, next door. I remember when we visited as a child, that us kids would all sleep upstairs in the attic area where there were a couple of bedrooms. Grandpa had alzheimers and he couldn't have his routine upset. When we went to bed we had to stay there and not be going up and down the stairs so Grandma left a chamber pot upstairs for us to use at night.
Behind the big house was a large glass greenhouse. I always loved how it smelled of earth andwarmth. My mother had a very large and ugly scar on her arm from playing and running through one of the greenhouse windows as a child. She was bleeding so badly...Grandpa took a rock and wrapped a cloth around it on her arm and made a tourniquet. He got his nurse sister again to hold Mom and drove in his old truck to the hospital where somebody really did a poor job of stitching her back up. Thus the really big messy scar.
The door on the side of the big house was supposed to one day have a beautiful deck built off of it for my grandmother. I suppose life and alzheimers got in the way. They had the money as Grandma worked as a well known cook into her seventies at the Cherokee Sirloin Room. The St. Paul Pioneer Press even wrote an article about her cooking career. I guess having survived the great depression, she was too frugal to splurge on herself for her deck and sadly it was never built.
One funny story about the door to nowhere as we called it, is when Grandma pushed a piano out of it! I guess she was tired of it taking up space and decided that was the easiest way to get it out of her house!
The little bit of house you see on the right side of the big house was Grandma's washroom. It had two deep, large concrete sinks in it. She had a modern washing machine by the time I was born but she would still use those old sinks to throw dirty grandchildren in and bathe them.
To the left of the big house was a large garden that Grandpa farmed. When Mom was little, she would ride with him in his truck as he traveled to the area neighborhoods selling vegetables. He did organic farming before it became popular and would order in ladybugs to keep the pests down. Years later, my dad, who was raised in West St Paul,would remember that vegetable man who would come to his neighborhood and realize it was my grandpa and the little girl sitting in the truck was his future wife!
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