---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 108-page perfect-bound ISSN#/ISBN# issue/paperback book “The Way She Was” cc&d, v317 (the January 2022 issue) Order the 6"x9" paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Unfinished Business the cc&d Jan.-April 2022 magazine issues collection book		get the 410 page Jan.-April 2022 cc&d magazine 6" x 9" ISBN# perfect-bound paperback book:

Iodine

James Bates

    I know I don’t have much time left. You can just tell by the way the attendants at Orchard Lake Senior Living are acting toward me.
    “And how are we today, Margaret?” they ask, so solicitously.
    I nod. “I’m fine.” And I am, I won’t go in to all that’s wrong with me. Like I said, I don’t have much time, ha ha. But really, I just wish they’d leave me alone. Alone with my memories. I’m old. I’m ninety-two and I’ve had a good life. I just want to rest and remember some of it. Like from back when I was young. Yes, way back then.
    When I was a kid, I never tired of hearing the stories Mom told about her mother and father, my grandma Esther and grandpa Harold.
    “Your grandma and grandpa, immigrated from Norway the late 1890s and settled in northern Minnesota near the town of Blackduck,” I remember her telling me when I was probably only five years old and lying sick in bed. She might have told me when I was younger, but, if she did, I forgot. I’ll be the first one to tell you I’m a bit of a scatter brain.
    As I recall, Mom went on. “You grandpa signed on with a logging crew and for a number of years spent the winter harvesting the forests throughout the northern part of the state. During the spring and summer, he helped your grandma in the huge vegetable garden she planted. She’d can the vegetables for the winter, and anything left over she sold in town to help make ends meet.”
    “Were they poor?” I asked.
    “Well, back then it was your grandma and grandpa and your uncles Freddie and Willie. My sisters and I weren’t born yet. We never had a lot of money,” Mom said, smoothing my hair and tucking it behind my ears before continuing on and making a point that has stayed with me my entire life. “But we had each other and a had good life, and that’s what counted.”
    I’m not sure I got it then, I was just a kid, born in 1929 and raised in the Depression, but I sure liked hearing about my grandparents, these two people I never got a chance to meet in person.
    “When the logging industry started to slow down, your grandfather turned to farming fulltime on our forty acres of land, something hard to do in that part of the state where the growing season wasn’t long enough to grow anything but potatoes.” See smiled at me. “So, your grandfather became a potato farmer.”
    “Potatoes?”
    “Yes, potatoes. It was the only kind of farming he could do.”
    “Really? Did you all starve?”
    “No, we didn’t,” she laughed, shaking her head slowly with a sad kind of smile. Then she mused up my hair. “You grandpa was a hard-working man, Maggie,” she continued. “He did all he could to provide for us.”
    I remember her telling me stories about my grandparents really well. I was a sickly child and if I wasn’t in bed because of the measles, mumps and chick pox, I was fighting off a cold or allergies. I even had pneumonia a few times. And all of that was before I was ten.
    We lived in Minneapolis and my dad was a salesman for a company that manufactured home thermostats. Mom took care of me and my two older brothers and worked part time at the corner grocery store. When I was sick, she would sit with me to keep me company and we’d talk, and she’d tell me about life on that farm, the farm where she grew up.
    “Oh, let me tell you, we had some fun times,” I remember her telling me more than once. “I was born in 1912, a few years before World War I. Those were tough times but we didn’t mind.” She laughed. “Probably because we were so busy. My dad worked the fields with my brothers and Blackie, our plow horse. He was a big boy. His shoulder was taller than me when I was your age. He had a black coat and four white stockings and a white blaze on his forehead,” Mom smiled at the me. “My dad loved that old horse.”
    “Did you ever ride him?” I asked snuggling under my blankets. I was probably six or seven years old and sick with the flu as I recall. Not feeling good at all, that was for sure. I remember it was when I first started reading the “Dotty Dimple” books. I couldn’t read them very well because I was kind of young, but I enjoyed them, especially when Mom helped me with the hard parts.
    “Sure, I rode Blackie,” Mom told me. “Well, walked, mostly. He was usually pretty tired from working the fields.”
    “How about grandma? Did she ever ride?”
    Mom cracked a grin a mile wide. “Sure, grandma would ride. Sometimes after supper we rode double down to the Long Meadow River and went swimming. There was a wide spot with a sandy bottom.” Mom quit talking for a minute and let her eyes go off into the distance for a while, imagining, I’m sure, warm summer evenings at the swimming hole, diving into the cool water and breathing the fresh scent of the verdant nearby fields. Just she and her mother, her beloved Mom.
    Then she came back to me, “Oh, swimming in that river was wonderful. Especially in August. I remember those hot summer days when the dust seemed to be everywhere. Mom would be up early, an hour before sunrise to get the coffee going for your grandad and breakfast started for us kids.”
    I remember this conversation really well. I was around nine years old at the time. “What’d you usually have for breakfast?”
    “Well, they were always big breakfasts, I’ll tell you, because everyone worked so hard. Mom fried bread, and we’d have oatmeal and eggs and usually some ham or sausage and fresh milk from dear old Jenny our milk cow.”
    “Milk cow?”
    “Yes, sweetie. We had a cow for our milk. She was a dear old thing. We’d use the milk to make cheese.”
    “I like cheese.”
    “I know you do, Maggie. And this cheese was the best. Really fresh tasting.”
    “I think I would have liked living on the farm.”
    Mom wrapped her arms around me and pulled me to her chest giving me a big hug. “I think you would have, too.”
    “Did, you like it?”
    “I loved it. It was me and your Uncle Fred, and Uncle Willie, my older brothers, and my older sisters, your Aunt Ada and Aunt Lucy.”
    “You were the youngest, right?”
    “Right. Everyone pitched in to help. Freddie and Willie helped your grandpa out in the potato field and with the animals and Ada and Lucy and me helped your grandma.” She smiled again. “We baked bread every day, did the cleaning, and helped prepare the meals. On Thursdays we did the laundry and on Fridays we did the ironing. We worked in the garden.” She paused and then said, “It was a good life.”
    It sounded like a good life, and Mom never tired of talking about her parents and growing up on the farm. But when she was about eleven, her parents were killed. She never told me what happened to them and mostly I didn’t want to know, because, even though I was a kid, I could tell it might be painful for her to talk about. But I was always curious, so this time while we were talking, I took a chance and asked, “Mom, I was wondering, whatever happened to grandma and grandpa?”
    “Oh, sweetie, I don’t know...”
    “That’s okay,” I hurried to stop her, “you don’t have to tell me.” I didn’t like seeing mom getting sad, especially after all she did, like working at the grocery store, running the household and taking care of me when I was sick so much.
    She folded her hands in her lap. “It’s all right, Mags,” she said, ‘Mags’ being her term of endearment for me, which meant she was going to confide something special to me, something grownup. “When I was eleven, just a year older than you are now, Mom and Dad were driving home from town on county road 53 in your grandpa’s old pickup truck and they were hit by another truck. It was a horrible head-on accident about five miles from the farm and they both died. So did the driver of the other truck.
    “Oh,” was all I could think to say. I knew that my grandma and grandpa were gone, but I just never knew how or why. Now I did.
    I looked at Mom, and she looked at me and surprised me when she smiled and said, “They were good people, Mags. Really good people.” Then she hugged me and I hugged her back. For a long time.
    A few days later, Mom came into my bedroom. I was reading one of the Dotty Dimple books. “How are you feeling?” she asked.
    “Fine,” I told her. “Just kind of weak.”
    She felt my forehead, a gesture that always made me feel good. “You’re a little warm. I’ll bring you some ginger ale in a little while. Would you like that?”
    I nodded. “I would, Mom. Thanks.”
    She pulled up a chair and I noticed she had a worn and tattered envelope in her hands. “I’ve got something here I thought you might like to see.”
    “Sure,” I said, setting my book aside. “What have you got?”
    She smiled, “Some pictures of back when I was growing up on the farm. I thought I’d lost them when you father and I moved here but I guess I just misplaced them. You and I talking about back then got me thinking, so I went looking and found them downstairs in a box of old books and stuff.”
    “Oh, goodie!” I was excited. “Can I see?”
    “Of course.”
    She moved closer and took them out one by one and showed them to me. They were curled at the edges and a little faded, but that didn’t matter. I was able to see pictures of Mom’s family, people I had come to know through the stories she’d told. There were photos of my Uncle Fred and Uncle Willie and Aunt Ada and Aunt Lucy, all of them taken outdoors around the farm. There were three or four of the farmhouse and barn. And there was even one of Blackie and one of Jenny.
    “These are cool,” Mom, I told her, looking closely, shuffling back and forth through them over and over. I couldn’t get enough. It was fun to see the faces of the people she’d told me about and the animals and the house.
    Then I stopped. “Mom?” I asked, “Don’t you have any pictures of grandma and grandpa?”
    She hesitated and then said, “Yes, Mags, I do. Do you want to see them?”
    “Sure!”
    So, she showed me one of grandma.
    I eagerly took a look, then gasped. “Oh, my goodness.” I turned to mom. “What’s wrong with her?” There was a lump the size of a softball that hung off the left side of grandma’s face like a grey bag of sand. I will be honest and say that it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen in my life. I didn’t want to stare at it, but couldn’t help myself.
    “It’s a goiter,” Mom said.
    “What’s a goiter?”
    Mom told me that a goiter was a massive growth that was usually associated with a thyroid gland out of whack. Lack of iodine was one of the main reasons for it. Grandma had one. It was pretty big.
    “Wow!” I said. “That is amazing.” And, it was.
    On the back, someone had written that the photo was taken in the front yard of the farm in 1921. Mom’s whole family was in it.
    “Here’s Freddie,” she said, pointing to a tall, angular looking man in his early twenties. “And here’s Willie.” My uncle was a good-looking lad with a crop of dark hair sticking out from under what looked like a beat-up fedora.
    “And here are my sisters, Ada and Lucy.” Mom’s sisters were about twelve and fourteen respectively and each wore a gingham dress and a bonnet.
    “They all look really nice, Mom,” I said. “And this is you?” I pointed. Mom was standing in front, a skinny girl with pigtails that stuck out from underneath her bonnet. She was smiling a wide smile.
    “Yes, that’s me.”
    “You all looked so happy.”
    She smiled. “Oh, we had our moments, let me tell you, but all in all we got along great. You have to learn how to do that growing up on a farm.” She paused, thinking, and added, “My mom, your grandma Ester had a lot to do with it.”
    I looked at grandma. She stood next to grandpa Harold who had on a suit and a nice-looking hat. He was grinning from ear to ear. Next to him was grandma. She wore a long dress with ruffles down the front and a bonnet. She was smiling at the camera.
    “They’re all dressed up,” I commented.
    “Yes. It was taken at my parents’ twenty-fifth anniversary. They hired a photographer to drive all the way out from Bemidji. It was quite the event.”
    “Wow,” was all I could say. I loved seeing my grandparents and aunts and uncles, but couldn’t help being drawn to grandma Ester’s goiter. I looked and looked, and might even have reached out and tentatively touched it with my finger before realizing it was just a photograph. “Did it hurt?” I asked, because it looked like it might.
    “No,” Mom said moving close to look at the photo with me. “No, it didn’t hurt. But it made your grandma self-conscious.”
    “How old was she when she got it?”
    “It started growing right after Freddie was born in 1898. It just kept getting a little bigger every year.”
    I frowned. “I’ve never seen one.”
    “They put iodine in table salt, now, so it’s lots less prevalent than it used to be.”
    “Table salt?”
    “Yes. Look on the container sometime. It says ‘Iodized salt added’ and that’s really all it took.”
    “Wow.” I kept looking at the photograph. I loved seeing Mom’s family. I couldn’t help it, I felt like I should be in the picture with them, too, after all the stories she had told me. “I love this picture. Can we frame it so I can have it in my room?”
    Mom smiled at me. “Sure, dear. I’d love you to have it.”
    Then I did some quick math. “How long after this was the accident?”
    “About a year. We were all a little older. After it happened the boys ran the farm and us girls helped out.”
    “Geez. That’s amazing, Mom.”
    She smiled. “We couldn’t have done it if my mom and dad hadn’t raised us right.” She pointed at the photograph. “Your grandma and grandpa.”
    I looked at the picture again. I liked seeing my relatives and mom’s family. I especially liked looking at grandma Ester. She had a compassionate face and kind eyes. Even though she had that goiter, she didn’t let it stop her from being a good mother, a good wife and an all-around good person.
    “I wish I could have met them,” I said.
    “Me, too,” Mom told me. “You would have loved them.”
    For some reason I felt a sudden urge to hug her, so I did. “You know what?” I said, breathing in a fresh scent something unique to my mother.
    “What’s that, dear?”
    “I love them already.”
    Mom smiled. “I’m glad.”
    “Me, too,” I grinned. “Me, too.”
    I have to say, I love those old memories and thinking back to those times when I was sick and Mom kept me company and told me about growing up on the farm, and the good times she had as a child with my grandma and grandpa.
    But now I’m kind of tired. I think I’ll close my eyes and drift off and dream about those times with Mom sitting on my bed and telling me stories and me imagining life growing up on the farm with her brothers and sisters and hardworking parents, my Grandpa Harold and Grandma Ester, who had a goiter the size of a softball, but didn’t let it stop her from being a good person.
    I take the old photograph, the framed one of Mom’s family she had given me so long ago and hold it in my lap. Then I drift off to sleep. It’s time to go now. I’m pretty sure I’ll be smiling in the morning when they find me.

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...