Alright, So I know I've been quite the unfaithful lover to my blog, but this is mostly due to the fact that my experiment ended!

I feel like my experiment never had the proper send-off (at least blog wise) that it deserved. A few weeks after it ended, I had the opportunity to have some good catching up time with my 75 year old great Aunt Anita, the daughter of my great grandmother who was mentioned in my first post. During this conversation she told me a story that I knew I just had to share. It was a small window into the 1940s, and through this window wasn't a cherry blue sky and pinup gals, but an honest and somewhat brutal moment of emotional coming from someone I knew and loved so personally, my great grandmother Anna.

This is that story. (told in the first person perspective of my great aunt):

Back in the day, we had to can all of our food. It wasn't just up and down the grocery aisle like you see now-a-days. Most all of the homes on our street here had their own gardens to grow vegetables that we would can for the winter time. With the economy the way it was, and the war waging over seas, frugality was next to Godliness, and my mother was determined to not let one pea pod escape our pantry.

She'd can for hours upon hours. Now, canning, as you might know, is a very dangerous process. Many accidents happened where people would get seriously injured or killed. We were lucky, though, and while there were some close calls, we never got seriously injured.

Now, many people on our block had sons in the war. There was hardly a man left in town. All of the able bodied men in our family were over there fighting. Now, your grandfather, he lied about his age to get in. He was only sixteen when he was flying planes over Germany. Your cousins too, they were over there fighting for Uncle Sam. Every man in our family was over there and the absence was felt every day.

It wasn't just the men over there though, they had a huge need for nurses and as you recall, your grandmother, my older sister was a nurse. She went in school with the full intention of going over seas and helping the cause in any way possible. With all of the hospitals getting bombed, my mother was very reluctant to see her off to medical school but she was adamant.

Now if you promised you'd go over seas, the government would pay for your schooling. The day after you graduated you'd be on a plane. My sister was quickly approaching graduation at this point in the year and my mother was torn up about it. With all the men gone, she couldn't stand the thought of losing her first born too.

On this particular day, I recall so vividly that she was out in the garden next to our home. She was in a light blue dress, with a white floral apron on to prevent stains. She was always meticulous about her appearance, even to the very end. I never saw a stain on that woman's clothing in my entire life. She would bend, over and over again to gingerly pick the vegetables, never on her knees as to dirty her clothing. I would help as best I could, but I was a clumsy child and would much rather be playing with the neighbors than helping my mother can. I must have been only eight or nine at this point.

Suddenly, the bells down in the town started to peal. I knew that it was a strange time of day for such a thing to occur since it wasn't time for mass. Shortly thereafter, the fire-engines were going off, as well as the police sirens. A whole bubble of sound was barreling up the hillside. Just then our neighbor across the street frantically opened the window and hung herself out of it yelling, "Mrs. Goslan! Mrs. Goslan! It's over! The war! It's finally over!"

My mother froze in shock, cucumbers gripped tightly in both hands as she slowly sank to her knees in the softly tilled soil of our garden and weeped.



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I miss you great-gram.

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