"It might not look like it," Grandma Eckman told me one sunny afternoon while we were sitting in the dining room of the senior facility where she lived, “but I do believe in marriage.”
We weren’t eating in there. She simply wanted a quiet place for us to talk. The residence was bustling that sunny summer day, and her roommate was entertaining her own family in their room. I had arrived after their Sunday dinner, so the dining room was basically deserted. It would be at least another hour or two before the kitchen assistants had to set up for the evening meal.
She was chilled, and I could understand that. It seemed to me that the warmer it became outside, the cooler the air conditioned inside was, not just here, but in about every institutional building everywhere. She was wearing a sweater. I recognized it as the one my mother gave her the previous Christmas.
She asked me if I wanted coffee to warm me up a bit, but I didn’t drink it so I declined. However, I should have dressed for the air conditioning instead of the outdoors, because in my tank top, I was shivering off and on.
“Just because I was married more than once…or twice…doesn’t mean I didn’t believe in the institution,” she continued. “But I would never stay in a bad marriage. My girlfriend Betty did that.”
“Betty?” I inquired, trying to place the name.
“You might not know about her. We were friends for several years. Met at church. Something clicked between us. She made the most heavenly apple pie. Now that’s not saying your mother doesn’t make the best pies overall, but no one could out apple Betty. Ha! Apple betty.”
She chortled at her own unplanned joke, and I smiled. My mother did make incredible pies. Her crusts were always perfect.
“Betty was a couple of years younger than I. She lived on a farm with her husband and five kids. She had given birth to twelve, but only five survived. This frustrated her husband, who blamed her for it. In those days, farms needed lots of kids. Free labor. So it was frustrating, and he blamed her. While he never came to church—well, hardly at all—she came religiously, mostly to beg forgiveness. She prayed for forgiveness like a banshee.”
“For what?” I asked.
Grandma Eckman sighed.
“Let’s see: for not having enough children for a farm, for how angry she made her husband, for not keeping her house clean enough, for her children misbehaving or not doing well in school, for a bad crop, for the cows not giving milk or the chickens not laying enough, for not having supper ready on time. You name it.”
I looked at her with an incredulous grimace.
“Honey, I kid you not,” she responded. “Betty carried her world on her shoulders and felt responsible for everything. But the worst thing was she often prayed not to be tempted.”
To be continued.
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