Remembering Grandma Moses

by Beth Moses Hickok

Overview

This is a portrayal, not of Grandma Moses's primitive paintings, but the woman herself: a crusty, feisty, upstate New York farmwife and grandmother, as remembered in affectionate detail by Beth Moses Hickok, who married into the family at 22, and raised two of Grandma's granddaughters. Set in 1934, four years before Grandma was discovered as an artist and soon gained national renown, the book includes treasured family snapshots, and an album of photographs that evoke the landscape of Eagle Bridge, New York, Grandma Moses's home for most of her long life. The cover depicts a rare colorful yarn painting given to the author as a wedding present by the artist.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781884592010
Publisher:	Arcadia Publishing SC
Publication date:	11/01/1994
Series:	Images from the Past
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.16(d)

About the Author

With this book in 1994 Beth Moses Hickok became a first-time published author at the age of 83. Her active life thus far has included raising four children and years of increasingly responsible roles in AARP at the local, state, and national levels. The original manuscript, entitled 'Ten Days with Grandma Moses, ' was written as the final paper for the author's three-year Famous Writers School correspondence course in 1962.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Remembering Grandma Moses

The worn, red, leather-bound diary lies before me on Great-grandfather Moses's old red cherry desk. I do not need it, except to quote accurately, for I remember her as though it were yesterday.

    Grandma Moses was sitting in a circle of light from a bridge lamp that was close to her small black, ladder-backed chair. The rest of the floor was in darkness. Grandma was saving electricity. A portable Singer sewing machine sat on a sturdy low, oak stand in front of her. It was held firmly in place with a clamp, because Grandma sewed with the vigor she put into all tasks. Across her lap and flowing over the stand to the floor was a gaily colored patchwork quilt. Its size accentuated her tiny bent figure.

    I thought Grandma was very old. She did look more than her 74 years, and I was only 23. This was on December 26, 1934.

    Her hair was entirely gray, long and thin, piled in a flat pug on the very top of her head. Her forehead was high, above her round, gold-framed glasses that covered the most expressive, bright, hazel eyes I had ever seen. The flesh over her cheekbones was firm and round and rose colored. Her nose, slightly Roman, was a well-shaped one. Deep lines ran to the base of her round chin and there were two soft packets of flesh that sagged below each side. Her face was patterned with work lines.

   She wore a flowered print housedress with a hem about six inches from the floor, along with black, soft, low-heeled Montgomery Ward oxfords and black cotton stockings.Hershoulders and arms were snugly covered by an old-fashioned, purple wool hug-me-tight. The house was very warm, but she explained that all her life she had gone from her warm, quilted, feather-ticked bed to a freezing-cold farm kitchen, and the memories of the drafts and ice-cold iron range remained so vivid that she shivered without the customary cozy garment.

    "What on earth are you doing up, all dressed and sewing at four o'clock in the morning?" I asked.

    She looked up at me with her head on one side, like a sassy sparrow, and answered, "And what are you doing down here in your night clothes?"

    "I heard the machine. It sounded like whirr-bump, whirr-bump. It makes a thump when it stops suddenly. I see now that it is because of the short seams of the quilt pieces. It's pitch dark out, Grandma."

    "I went to bed at a Christian hour, wasn't out ramming around all night," she snapped.

    I drew my robe tightly around me and remembered my mother's warnings about not answering Grandma back.

    Frank, her nephew and son-in-law, and I had come in before midnight after coffee with friends he wanted me to meet.

    "The first thing I ever sewed was a quilt for my doll's cradle," I said. "My Grandma Stuart cut out the squares and I had to sew them together with an over-and-over stitch."

    "Oh! You sew?" she asked.

    "Yes, and I like it very much. If I wanted clothes I had to. I'm a country farm girl too, you know."

    Thus began the second day of my Christmas vacation visit. I drew up a dining chair and sat down beside her.

    "I s'pose you're set on marrying Frank." Grandma leaned back and held two quilt pieces in tensed hands — small, thin, blue-veined, arthritic, creative, workworn hands.

    "That's what I'm here to decide. I love him and he is very lonely. He loved your Anna, so it is worse for him than it would be for a man who had not got on with his wife. It is almost three years but because of the age difference (Frank was 34) and the fact that I have not finished the education my family expects of me, plus the responsibility of little girls, seven and eight and a half, it is not something to take lightly. Because of my big family and the Depression, I feel old for my age."

    "So?" She seemed to be waiting.

    "First I must get acquainted with Zoan and Frances and see if they want me."

    "'Course they want ya now. It's all kisses and buttermilk, but what-cha going to do comes time they need a lickin'?"

    I laughed. "Lickin's will have to be in Frank's department. Gosh, Grandma, I only weigh 105 pounds. I might get the worst of that deal."

    She chuckled and I wondered if perhaps she envisioned that possibility with a bit of relish.

    "Frank says you're anxious to go home to your farm in Eagle Bridge."

    "I certainly do want to go home," she declared. "I've been away too long now. I have things I want to do. Maybe I'm homesick, don't like village livin' and never did."

    "I understand how you feel about the girls. They'll miss you and naturally you'll worry about them but you can have them visit and you'll always be welcome here."

    "'Course I'll worry but I've brought up so many young'uns I'm tired of it. Once'st I know they're in good hands, I'll be satisfied. Hugh's three kids are at the farm but they're Dorothy's job, not mine. I don't plan to do much visitin' ...'" She shook out the quilt with a snap. "As I say, I have things I mean to do."

    (Little did either of us dream of all she was to do in the next twenty-seven years!)

    For the next thirty-six years I've been trying to explain my relationship to Grandma Moses but it still confuses everyone, so I'll start at the beginning.

    Her full name was Anna Mary Robertson Moses, but almost everyone called her Grandma.

    There were three Moses brothers: William, Thomas, and Walter. Thomas was Grandma's husband. Walter was my husband Frank's father. William and Walter settled in Vermont. Thomas and his bride, Anna Mary, went to a farm in Staunton, Virginia, where they had ten children. Five lived, and five were either stillborn or died in infancy. Thomas and Mary suffered a heavy loss when their Staunton house burned, and they were homesick for Eagle Bridge, New York.

    Walter and William prospered. In 1905 Walter found and bought the Eagle Bridge farm for Thomas, and sent for him. It was a good farm. Thomas and Anna Mary came with their children: Ona, Loyd, Forrest, Anna, and Hughie. They worked from sunup to sundown and paid for the farm in a very few years.

    Walter and his sons, Paul and Frank, helped out, spending a great deal of time there. As time went on, Frank and Anna fell deeply in love. There was an awful row because they were cousins, so they eloped to The Little Church Around the Corner. Grandma never seemed to mind as much as the others.

    Grandpa Walter, who was a carpenter by trade, gave them a house lot next to his home on Elm Street in Bennington, Vermont, and helped them to build a beautiful home.

    Anna had been in nurse's training but was forced to give up because of a bout with tuberculosis. Her case had been arrested but their two little girls came close, one after the other. Frank and his Dad worked against time to get her into the new home. In 1933 Anna died. Grandma Anna Mary, who was by then a widow, stayed on after Anna's long sickness, kept house, and took care of Zoan and Frances.

    Grandma was Frank's aunt by marriage, his mother-in-law via Anna, and she was Zoan and Frances's maternal grandmother, for they are double Moseses.

    I met Frank early in 1934. I visited, or rather called at, his home briefly on two occasions. We took the little girls on outings during the summer. By fall, Frank had asked me to marry him. Each of his daughters had made a week's visit to my family home in Massachusetts. Frank's father approved heartily. But Grandma knew others she would rather have for a stepmother to the girls.

    I said, "I will go to Bennington and spend Christmas vacation with you all and see if marriage will be right for all of us." That's how the ten days came about.

    Christmas Day 1934

    The mountains were deep purple, the sky blue-gray, and it was snowing gently as we drove through the Berkshires. The scenes were pure romance, the essence of the New England dream Christmas.

    The little girls greeted me with excited hugs, Grandma with old-fashioned hospitality. Most of the rooms in the white house, with its four sturdy green gables, were still stark-white, unpapered hard plaster. The oak floors were waxed and buffed to a mirror surface. There was a tall, brightly lighted but sparsely trimmed Christmas tree in the corner of the large living room.

    Grandma led me up the winding staircase to the spotless master bedroom that reached across the entire front of the house. She showed me the modern bath, children's room, sunporch, and her small bedroom, next to mine.

    "This is a lovely house," I said. "How nicely you keep it, Grandma."

    "It's got all the modern conveniences," she answered. "Walter and Frank don't spare the horses none when they're building, and I ain't too old to keep house, not yit."

    "I just love the bay window and the window seat. I've always liked light and sunshine in a house."

    She bustled about, opening a drawer for me to use, and opening both of the walk-in closets at each end of the room.

    "Anna's coats and a few of her dresses and such are still hanging here." She looked straight at me as though measuring my reaction.

    Not knowing what to say, I just kept quiet.

    "They's some Franks age who like bay winders too," she snapped.

    "Grandma, I ... I can well understand how you feel. I came here to decide what to do and I hope you will help me. Can't we be friends?"

    At this she smiled, and her sharp hazel eyes twinkled. "Well, we kin try." With that she whirled and trotted off down the stairs, calling over her shoulder, "You best wash up in a hurry. I'm a-goin' to put dinner on right off."

    A few great, lazy snowflakes drifted down, but afternoon sun shone through the triple-mullion windows on the west wall of the dining room and onto the Christmas table, set with white, Roman gold-rimmed, hand-painted china and delicate old linen.

    Zoan said, "Our mother painted these dishes and fired them in her own kiln at the farm."

    "They're beautiful, dear," I said. "We must be very careful of them so that you and Frances can have them when you grow up. Such a big and complete set, you can both have plenty. She must have been a fine artist."

    Oh, what a dinner that was. We began with tall, sparkling goblets of fleshly squeezed orange juice, followed by roast capon, stuffed with old-fashioned bread dressing, light, dry, and oniony. There were fluffy mashed potatoes, buttered steamed squash, golden boiled onions, turnip, candied sweet potatoes, carrot and cabbage salad, fleshly baked yeast rolls, cranberry sauce, three kinds of pickles, celery, olives, nuts, mince pie, pumpkin pie, sage cheese, sharp rat-trap cheese, chocolate and divinity fudge, half English walnuts filled with fondant, stuffed dates, peanut brittle from an old Virginia recipe, and a ten-cup, agate-wear pot of fragrant boiled coffee.

    "Grandma! I'm breathless! I have never had a more bountiful or delicious dinner in my life. You're the world's best cook."

    "The Moseses," she declared, "are always good providers. Their womanfolk are expected to set a good table."

    Was this meant as instruction? I wondered.

    Frank spoke up. "Aunt Mary does a heap of canning, jelly making and pickling, and nobody on this earth can make raised rolls to beat hers. Not even to match them."

    "If I laid-um end-ta-end, that I've raised, they'd reach from here to Californee," she chuckled.

    "Do you mind the time, Frank, I put the big padlock on the cold-pantry door, to keep you boys out and you swiped ya father's hacksaw and sawed it off?" Turning to me with laughing eyes, "Those duffers et six pies I'd set up for weekend comp'nee."

    Frank remembered, the children giggled, and I encouraged their reminiscences to learn what I could of their family background.

    I suddenly remembered Grandpa Walter Moses and his sister next door. "How come Grandpa and Aunt Alice didn't join us for Christmas dinner?" There were a few seconds of silence, then Grandma, with no embarrassment at all, said, "Alice and I ain't talkin'!"

Table of Contents

Introduction	7
Remembering Grandma Moses	17
Family Photographs	22—23 and 26—27
The Landscape of Eagle Bridge	50
Chronology	61