The Minnesota Farm Woman

My grandparents owned a gas station in Chisholm, Minnesota and lived in the apartment above.
After Grandpa died in 1960, the station closed. Grandma still lived upstairs, and that’s where we would go to visit her. Since the building took up the whole lot, Grandma had no yard or garden. She had grown up on a farm, so this must have been hard for her, but we never heard her complain. Her outdoor area was a large black tar roof with a clothesline. As a child, I was fascinated by the rooftop view of the houses and neighborhood below.   We were never allowed to go out there by ourselves, for obvious reasons. My cousins have tales to tell of getting scolded for jumping off, so I guess they were either much braver than my sister and I , or they were better at slipping away from watchful adult eyes.

After Grandma died, one of my uncles lived there, but it was old, there was a fire, and the place got condemned and torn down. The empty lot remained.  Of the five sons my grandparents raised, only two remain, the oldest and the youngest. One is 91 and one is 81 and we are blessed to have them both. The younger uncle has come up from Florida the past few summers and has mentioned that he had been planting some flowers in the lot to spruce it up a bit. He has not had a good year, health wise. He feels better but not good. His right foot drags due to an old stroke. His friends are dying. He feels the years, and they don’t feel so good.  His daughter asked if I wanted to come and see what he had done, and perhaps give him a hand.

On the drive over, I wasn’t sure how I would feel.  I had not been there since Grandma’s funeral more than 30 years ago, when it was still a house. To see that empty lot would be sad to say the least, and I wanted to remember it as it was.

What I found was a true labor of love. There are flowers and paths and a stone wall. There are seven trees planted, one for each of his parents, and one for each son they raised. There are benches that welcome a walker to sit and rest, as this is a town where folks still walk downtown for their errands, just as my grandmother did all those years ago.

The three of us hauled stone pavers and pulled weeds. It was hard sweaty work, but it was
good work.  He has done a lot, and has a lot more to do before his job is complete.  He is working hard, and as he works, he remembers. He is leaving his hometown a legacy and not an empty lot.  He is leaving a memory of a family;  of sons who grew up to be athletes and soldiers and fathers.  What I like best is that his mother, my beloved grandmother, who had a big black tar roof instead of a back yard, finally has a beautiful flower garden with seven trees.  I know, as much as I know my own name, that somehow she was watching us today and smiling.