Grandma Poppy's House and Hanging Laundry
A story from my childhood
The sun warms my skin as I hang my laundry on the line that stretches across the small balcony of my Tavira, Portugal apartment. My stocking-clad feet become chilled from the tile floor, still bitterly cold from the damp and frigid temperatures of the Portugal night in December.
When we first arrived in Portugal, more than a year ago, I dreaded the thought of not having a dryer and having to hang my laundry each and every time I washed clothes.
I’ve been hanging my laundry for more than a year now and it has given me a completely different perspective. It is a chore I no longer consider a chore. It has provided moments of peace in our busy day to day activities. It has become a time to reflect on the scene beyond my small terrace, a scene so unlike anything I experienced in all my years living in the United States. It has become a time for thankfulness and sweet reflections of the life I’ve lived.
Sometimes I think about my Grandma Poppy when I am out hanging clothes. We called her Grandma Poppy because my grandpa was called Poppy, so to young minds it only made sense that her name would be Grandma Poppy.
Poppy came into my mom’s life when she was 12-years-old. Her dad died when my mom was just 4-years-old. I think he got shot in the leg…and it got infected…I’ve also heard he was quite the ladies’ man and had a reputation of stepping out on my grandma. I really have no idea how he got shot or who shot him, or if it was a result of an angry husband or star-crossed lover. I guess that is something I will never know, since those that do know are all gone now.
I think about my Grandma Poppy and the clothesline she used to dry her sheets, her towels, and her husband’s, and her own clothes on. I’m sure her clothes consisted mostly of work clothes; smelly and damp from hours upon hours, days after days of working at the fish cannery. With seven mouths to feed beside her own and no husband to help her, the nights at the cannery were born out of pure necessity.
Grandma Poppy’s clothesline stretched from her tiny deteriorating princess balcony, across her sloping side yard to the giant cedar tree 30 yards from her house.
As I write this I wonder, was it a cedar tree, could it have been 30 yards? Trying to dredge memories from deep inside my brain from when it, my brain, was, in its youthful stage, has me doubt my facts.
Across the street was a hillside covered in ivy; my brother, sisters and cousins would slide down the hill on flattened cardboard boxes into the street. Thankfully traffic was almost nonexistent there and adults didn't care if kids were sliding down hillsides damaging all the ivy along the way. They were too busy enjoying their own life to care what their kids were doing, as long as they could see them out the window from time to time to make sure they weren’t getting into too much trouble, parents of that era basically just let their kids live their kid lives.
I loved my Grandma Poppy’s house, it was full of mystery and wonderful hiding places. The dark, damp, spider-webby basement was a curious child’s dream and I loved to plink away on the old piano that sat mostly lifeless in the ray of daylight shining from the dust encrusted window. Dust danced and swirled into and out of that sliver of light in the seldom visited basement.
Inside the house was a wide, wooden staircase that led to the second story, which consisted of two bedrooms and a bathroom. There were two landings on the thick wooden staircase that wrapped around one side of the living room. The first landing held a tall porcelain vase filled with dust covered fake flowers, the other had an oversized cupboard with one shelf inside, it was full of old family snapshots. I pulled them out one by one, ever so curious about the people dressed in black and white that bore some resemblance to me, my siblings or aunts or uncles. Others held no familiarity. I believe it was at this moment, as I rummaged through this photo-filled cupboard, the love of photography dropped into every fiber of my being. It would take me the entire three days we would be there visiting to go through all of the photos, so I set the handful of photos back into the cupboard with a thought to return that evening.
Continuing up the stairs on the righthand side were three cupboards. The first one I was not tall enough to reach the cupboard knob, the second one I could reach it, but even on my tippy toes my fingers could only, just barely touch the knob, not enough to grasp it to pull it open. The third cupboard was close to the top of the stairs, easily within my reach and full of forgotten treasures. I pulled open the cupboard, it shivered under the released pressure from being closed for too long. I remember there being several old boxy cameras. My fingers wrapped easily around one of the small metal boxes. I was sure this was one of the cameras responsible for the cupboard full of photos just ten feet from where I sat at the top of the wooden staircase. I may not have been understanding the significance of what I held at the time, but looking back on this moment my ten-year-old self was experiencing, I can see how this very moment set me on a course of photography playing a part of almost every piece of my life, something that would last at least up to this moment.
I wrapped my fingers around the cold metal box and pulled it out from under the rest of the contents of the closet. I have no recollection of what else was tuck away inside this cupboard at the top of the stairs, I was completely enthralled by the object I held in my hand.
I stood up from my place at the top of the stairs, my small bare feet walked silently across the hardwood floors as I passed the small bathroom and made my way to the first of two upstairs bedrooms.
This one was my favorite of the two, it had the best view. The window was high on the wall, so I had to scootch the wooden chair from the corner where it sat most of the time, to under the window so I could climb up on it and see the landscape below.
From this window I could see the castle house that was across the street from my grandma's. I could also see Willapa Bay where fisherman would dock their boats. One night in my youth I remember the Navy sailors that came to town for South Bend Days. From my vantage point I fell in love with the idea of marrying a Navy sailor, as fate and the law of attraction would have it, I did just that, at 18 years old, but that is a story for another time in another season.
Jumping from the chair to the bed, after I had my fill of looking at the peaceful scene outside my grandma's upstairs window, I laid down and twisted and turned the camera over and over in my hands, curious as how clicking a button on this black and silver box could produce a picture. It was a complete mystery to me.
I looked through the small glass covered hole on the camera and slowly pressed the shutter button.
"Click", I said in unison with the camera.
My dad was an amateur photographer and although his long lens camera looked nothing like the box I held in my hand, I did know enough that the camera needed film, which it did not have as I clicked away taking imaginary pictures of everything that was in the small bedroom at the top of the stairs at my grandma's house.
The metal framed bed had a quilt made of tiny multicolored squares, the small wooden nightstand held a milk glass green lamp with a cream-colored lamp shade. A small rug lay beside the bed and the wooden chair that was now in front of the window with rose colored curtains were the only things in the room. The walls were bare, but in my mind, they would soon be filled with photos I had taken with this small little treasure of a camera I had found. My photos would be filled with these inanimate objects, also known as my subjects, captured in my imagination with this real camera.
From where I lay on the multicolored quilt and cushy pillows, I could hear a commotion going on downstairs, I sat up, set the camera on the nightstand, and quietly made my way toward the noise and laughter that rose up the stairs like the dust storms of northeast Oregon, swirling and noisy, only this cloud was dusted with a mix of laughter and resentment.
I knew I was trading the peace and solitude of the upstairs for the noisy, chaotic space that was downstairs.
The people in this family talked loudly, laughed loudly, and fought even louder. If there was love in this house it was muted, I don’t remember ever feeling it much, I'm not sure what I saw could even be considered love, but my sister, who was very close with my grandma, would attest to the fact that there was love there. She never felt more love than when she was in the presence of my grandma. My grandma did not have the same effect on me.
I, however, loved there. I loved my oldest aunt, who was the oldest of the seven children. She was loud and funny and never afraid to speak her mind. I loved my other aunt, who was also funny, loud and never afraid to scream her mind. My mom was the other 'girl' in the family, she was the baby. She was not loud, she never, well almost never, raised her voice, and she was more serious than funny, but her sisters got her to laugh often.
My uncles were all unique and completely different from each other. One of my uncles had the guts to feel me up as I sat on his lap when I was about 12. The moment he did that to me I flew off his lap as fast as I could and turned back toward him, glaring the hardest glare I ever glared. It didn’t seem to faze him. I looked around the room and out of the dozen or so family members that were there, not a single one of them witnessed that moment. Not my dad, not my mom, not my grandma, not Poppy or my aunts or my cousins. He had violated me in front of them all, and completely got away with it.
I should have told my favorite uncle what his brother did to me, but I didn’t. I never felt like I had a voice when I was young. We couldn’t disagree with our parents who never really took much interest in what was happening in mine and my sibling’s lives. It was close to ‘children are to be seen not heard’ kind of childhood. Sure, they like to see us smile and laugh and have a good time, but heaven forbid we actually turn to them when we were going through a rough time. That just didn’t happen. Time heals a lot sometimes and now my dad is one of the first ones I turn to in times of trouble or sadness.
I took an interest in genealogy when I was young, something my favorite uncle had an interest in as well. He told me everything he knew about our family and even gave me a huge family bible that had traveled across the US on the Oregon Trail in 1853. It has been a coveted treasure of mine ever since.
Another uncle lived far away, so I didn't get to know him very well throughout my life, and the youngest of my grandma’s children, the youngest brother of my moms was living under the Burnside Bridge in Portland, Oregon during the years of my youth. I only met him a couple of times. While he was the baby of the family, he looked like the oldest. A hard life, hard liquor and homelessness can do that to a person.
Yes, all these unique people can make for a noisy rambunctious house, and I loved it! The atmosphere was always swirling out of control in laughter, laughter on the edge of anger…that part made me nervous, but when everyone was having a good time, I was in my zone. Even as a child I liked new and exciting experiences and it always felt like a party at my grandma’s house when everyone would gather. We didn’t go there often, We lived eight hours away in northeast Oregon, so our visits were few and far between, only about once every summer or two.
One of the most memorable nights during one of our visits has been a source of laughter for many years. I was about 12.
The three sisters were very different from each other and throughout my life there were very few times that one wasn't mad at another one, of course they all had to tell their side of the story to convince the sister who was not mad at the others, they were in the ‘right’. Eventually the two sisters would get mad at the third sister and no longer be mad at each other. It was a vicious cycle and it lasted until both my aunts passed away in their old age.
On one particular night they were all together. There was the yearly celebration happening downtown in South Bend, where they all grew up and went to high school, so they decided to go and have a few drinks and enjoy the evening. They lived far apart from each other, so this would be the perfect opportunity to catch up on each other’s lives.
Around 1 a.m. my sister and I were just climbing into bed on the hide-away couch in the living room when the front door burst open near the foot of our bed.
In ran the first aunt, hell bent on making it to the bathroom before she had an accident. My mom and the second aunt followed, and in an instant we could tell she was fuming mad.
"I'm going home." she yelled as she turned around and stomped back out the front door, slamming it as hard as she could behind her. She cared not one iota that Poppy and Grandma Poppy were sleeping just a few steps away in their small bedroom off of the dining room.
With barely enough time to close, the door flew open again.
"Like hell I am," she yelled as she ran past our bed and through the dining room, toward the bathroom where aunt number one still sat on the pot.
The bathroom was long and skinny and, according to the first aunt, she saw the second aunt coming at her full speed ahead. The first aunt tried to stand up from her sitting position, so she could pull up her pants, but before she knew it aunt number two was standing in front of aunt number one, pushing her back down on the pot, causing everything on the shelf behind her to shake, rattle and vibrate against the wall that separated the bathroom from Poppy and Grandma Poppy’s bedroom.
At this point my sister and I are sitting straight up in bed, worried looks across our faces, and ears cocked toward the kitchen, as we listened to the chaos that was happening in the bathroom in the middle of the night. We couldn’t hear a word Aunt Number One was saying, but the obscenities that flew from Aunt Number Two’s mouth were loud and plentiful.
At this point our short chubby grandma, with her clown patch forehead, caused from a skin graft as a result of car wreck that nearly took her life, is yelling, “What the hell is going on around here?” as she is finishes tying her tattered robe closed.
She is in her element. Her kids are fighting, in the middle of the night, what in the world could be better? She might have been angry for being woken up at 1 a.m., but she knows there’s a good story behind it all and her angry face also shows a hint of a smile as she watches aunt number two storm past her and back through the front room and out the front door, slamming it closed behind her.
Aunt Number One walks into the room, looking half drunk and half exhausted, also with a half-smile across her face.
‘This family is nuts’, goes through my mind. It is so different here than in my own home that is almost whisper quiet, other than the country music that plays each day from the phonograph, or Paul Harvey’s Rest of the Story that plays each day before we head out the door to school. Loud friends felt guilty at my house because they know, at 12-years-old, they are destroying the peace that is my homelife when they arrive with their childhood laughter. I assure them that the laughter is fine, but there is still an uneasiness for them there.
"I kept trying to stand up and she would push me back down,” Aunt Number One would say. “I would try to stand up and she would push me back down again. Over and over."
My tone in telling of aunt number one’s reaction is nothing like what I witnessed that night. Aunt Number One is very animated, so not only was she telling the story, but she was also acting it out, with grimacing facial expressions, and her pretending to pull her pants up at the same time she was getting slammed back down to the toilet by her little sister who was 5' 10" and 250 pounds of solid muscle.
My sister and I rolled on the bed in laughter as Aunt Number One processed what had just happened to her as she told and retold the entire story half a dozen times. Our laughter encouraged her storytelling and the embellishment that came with each new version of the event. My grandma smiled and chuckled at each new version of the story as well, as she rocked happily in her fabric rocking chair, content that chaos reigned in her home once again.
As I have gotten into the routine of hanging my laundry in the warm Portuguese sun, or the cold Portuguese air, depending on the season, I have a new appreciation for the grandma that hung her laundry from the little princess porch in South Bend, Washington. I wonder if she loathed the process or found peace and solitude away from her rambunctious children, whether those children were toddlers, teenagers, young adults, or old women, I am sure they provided years of joy and laughter and the need to hang laundry for one reason or another.
As we head into 2024 I wish you all a years worth of good laundry experiences. I know that is a stretch for some of you who are doing a whole families worth of laundry. I think that has a lot to do with why I find myself enjoying laundry now. I’ve been under those mountains of laundry that have turned me into a sobbing mess wondering how in the world I would ever get done with all my laundry with four kids in the house and two adults. There’s a great story there too, but I’ll have to save it for another time because I have to go hang my laundry.
Much love to you all. Happy 2024, may it be filled with peace and blessings in your part of the world.
Lori
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