What a Chore!
I was probably seven years old when my maternal grandmother, a first-generation Swede from Saint Paul, came to live with us on our two-hundred-acre family farm. Inga was a year or two past sixty but with her thinning white hair and deeply creased face looked considerably older. Her husband, Herman, had died of a “widow-maker” heart attack three years before while walking home from his managerial job at the Union Depot. For a while, Inga shared her house with a close female friend, but in the end decided she’d rather spend what time remained in the company of her three daughters and their families.
In the years that followed, my grandmother would reside in Illinois with us for six months and split the remainder between her other daughters in New Jersey and Texas. Because our modest brick farmhouse wasn’t large enough to accommodate another adult, Grandma Inga purchased a small mobile home that sat across the lawn from our own front door. Here she and Tony, her pampered dachshund, lived quite agreeably during my formative years.
Inga brought her work ethic with her from Saint Paul, and while my mother was in town practicing occupational therapy and Dad was either planting, cultivating or harvesting the crops, she kept the home fires burning. Grandmother padded around the premises in her sensible shoes and faded floral house dress, retrieving dust bunnies from under the beds and preparing a variety of simple casseroles in our cramped kitchen. And…she took charge of the half-acre garden on which Dad broke the ground early each spring.
My siblings and I were, of course, expected to put in time weeding and thinning the rows of lettuce, radishes, carrots, spinach, and pole beans under her supervision. We had other chores to perform more or less independently - managing a small flock of ducks, mucking the pig stalls, mowing the lawn – but in the garden we worked under Inga’s watchful eye. For her, there definitely was a proper and an improper way to apply ourselves.
The old Swede was, of course, meticulous and God forbid that we pull a fledgling potato plant from the ground rather than an encroaching plantain. Her discriminating approach to the task made sense, but what made the work into a “real chore” (in the pejorative sense of that phrase) was Inga’s insistence that we do this work from an upright position. Stand up, plant your feet wide and straddle the row, bend at the waist, uproot the weedy intruder, then repeat the process ad infinitum.
Our grandmother’s rational for imposing this discipline on her grandchildren – and me in particular, since I was a chunky lad – was that it would serve to tone one’s flaccid belly. Kneeling or sitting on the soil might get the job done, but it was an inferior form of exercise. Nor was she the sort to stand idly by while her grandkids sweated in this sun baked nursery. Inga modeled the behavior we were supposed to follow and she often continued to work even after we’d been dismissed from our purgatory.
The lesson stuck, however. I’m now ten years older than Inga was when she arrived on our doorstep, but whenever I bend to pull a long strand of creeping charlie away from strangled day lilies, her image floats into my consciousness and I silently thank her for a firmer waistline.
