Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child?: Practice Resurrection Stories
“So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?”
I’m grateful to my mom, Nancy G. Hill, for writing today’s post. This is re-printed from a beautiful project she’s working on with Storyworth. (I’ll share more details at the end of today’s story.) If you’ve been following along in this series of Resurrection stories, you’ll notice my grandmother Geraldine and her mother Calla Mae. Consider today’s story a prequel to this one.
Just an Old Letter
by Nancy G. Hill
I have in my possession several photographs of my maternal grandmother, Calla Mae Welton Hendricks. She is young and beautiful with her high collar and her thick dark hair. Since I had no memories of my grandmother, I would occasionally study the photos to try to learn something about this woman who was my mother’s mother and my Aunt Helen’s mother. Was Calla especially serious, I wondered, or did she have a sense of humor? Was she hardworking or did she tend to be lazy? Did she enjoy being the mother of two daughters?
My mother couldn’t help me with answers to these questions; she had no memories of her mother either. Calla Hendricks died of scarlet fever when her baby-Geraldine Ruth Hendricks-was nine months old.
In the summer of 1989, my four sisters and I spent three days with our mother in Hancock, NY, helping her sort through years of possessions—organizing and making piles, then filling garbage bags for several trips to the village dump. One of those days, while my mother was in the kitchen filling the house with the aroma of freshly baked cinnamon buns, I was sorting through the papers of Mom’s late sister, Helen. Suddenly I held in my hand a letter, a letter that none of us even knew existed, and a letter that I would soon learn was beyond price.
My mother’s birth date was February 2, 1912, and this letter was dated October 4, 1912. The handwriting in the letter looked remarkably like my mother’s and the signature read: Calla. My family gathered in a circle and we wept as we read aloud the words of a healthy young mother of two who would be dead in less than three months.
This letter was like a window into my grandmother’s personality. The pictures we already possessed took on new meaning. For the first time in her 77 years of life, my mother “heard” her mother speak lovingly of her two little daughters. Did Calla have a sense of humor? You bet! She was still laughing as she recounted the antics of her two-year-old Helen. And was Calla lazy or was she hardworking? I’ll let you decide:
I put up about 100 quarts of berries and currants and have a lot of pears to do up yet. Have eight quarts of corn and a lot of jelly. Have been making tomato pickles today but didn’t get it all done. I picked up most of the berries myself. Wasn’t I smart?
Another part of the letter, even more moving than when she called her two little ones “dears” was when she wrote: We all went to the Eddy yesterday. I got some cloth to make baby some rompers.”
Those written words caused the unsmiling face in our few pictures to burst into life. Even though her mother would be tired from a day of picking berries and chasing babies, Geraldine could now envision a lovely face bent over the treadle sewing machine. The flickering light from the kerosene lamp would be casting shadows on the walls as Calla made rompers from the cloth she had carefully chosen for her precious little Geraldine. And now my mother could even imagine her own mother’s warm arms reaching out to lift her precious baby girl from her crib.
Just a few words written in that letter breathed life into those photographs and my grandmother had become a real person to us all, not a still face on a glossy piece of paper. I also feel quite certain that if my grandmother had lived, she would have slipped pennies into my chubby little palm to go to the corner store to buy licorice. Most certainly she would have sent me a card on my birthday. I also suspect that she might have casually mentioned to her friends at the church social that her granddaughter was the sixth grade spelling champion.
One letter, in Calla’s own handwriting—what price tag could be placed on that? Obviously, this is indeed a letter without price; I’ll forever cherish the smudged, faded letter written by Calla Mae Hendricks over 100 years ago.
When my mom retired this summer, we gave her a one-year subscription to StoryWorth. Once a week they email my mom a question that we never thought to ask, and she simply replies with a story, which is shared with our family each week via email and/or logging into her private StoryWorth page. At the end of a year, my mom’s stories are bound into a beautiful keepsake book.
This has been such a gift already and we don’t even have the printed book yet. I imagine I’ll be sharing a few more stories from my mom here with you all soon.
(By the way, if you decide you’d like to subscribe for yourself or someone you love and you use this link, you’ll get $10 off your order and we’ll get an additional printed copy of my mom’s book: https://www.storyworth.com/friend/tamara-murphy5)