A Trip Back In Time

I’ve always been interested in all things historical. Sometimes I’ve thought maybe I would have enjoying living in an earlier time. The closest opportunity I ever got came when I was about 9. The distance from my childhood home in Rockvale to my great-grandmother’s home in Christiana, was only 18 miles, but it felt much further. Christiania was a booming little town back in the early 1900’s. It sat on the railroad. Trains came through several times a day, connecting the community with the outside world, back when trains were as much for passengers as they were for freight.

The little town these days is most known for the restaurant, Miller’s Grocery. The store ran by Mr. Stanley Miller was the hub of the community, which also had a bank and a post office. But where my great-grandmother lived wasn’t in the town proper. It was further removed on an old roughly paved road. Rock Springs Road felt like it must have been further than the 18 miles from our home.

My great-grandmother lived in this five room home for all of her adult life. At the time of my stay, she still didn’t have indoor plumbing. She didn’t get a bathroom until a government grant gave the money to do so in 1982. At this time, she had a potty chair in the only bedroom. There was an old outhouse. She used an old metal tub, which she would fill with heated water once a week and use in her kitchen. The house wasn’t much to look at. It was a tar paper shack with a metal room. An abandoned and opened unattached garage set about 10 feet away from the house. Grandmother, as I called her, like so many women of her generation, never learned to drive a car. The house could just as easily be a remote island. Her only close neighbor was a family with a farm that lived across the road. Otherwise, a rotary dial phone and her TV with rabbit ears was her only connection to the outside world.

The slanted front porch gave access to the front door. When you walked in, you were in the living room to the left. Straight back, there was an open dining room and two doors on the left. One accessed the attic and the other was the entry to the only true bedroom. To the right of the front door, you could go into the front room, which she used almost as an apartment. Her bed was a single bed that was pushed up into the far corner. An old rug was in there, along with a propane heater. She had her TV in there and an old low sitting rocker with a thatched seat. By this time, she was already in her 80’s. Her days were very predictable. She fixed her meals and watched her stories. I’m sure it was loneliness, but she would engage with verbal criticism and questions for the characters on the soap operas.

We enjoyed each other’s company more than we ever could these days, with all of the online this and that, cell phones and what have you. A flimsy card table was produced, and I put it up, where we could play checkers game after game. Except she didn’t have checkers. She had the board, but for the checkers, she got out an old tin can filled with every button you could imagine. We had more than enough to get colors that would work, where we could keep up with what we were doing.

Afternoons were times for leisurely strolls on the road, where we would walk to a creek and turn around at the bridge. She required a walking cane, and I felt like I needed one too. So, I used the cane that had belonged to her husband, who passed away before my birth. It sits in my living room now, as I write. A rattlesnake was carved, where it circles down the cane. I thought I was something, walking with that cane. It was rare to sight a car on these walks. This area felt more rural than the one I lived in.

For supper, she would whip us up something or other relatively simple. We would eat at the small formica table in the kitchen that looked like it was right out of the 1950’s. She baked these wonderful cookies. But she called them teacakes. She would fill this old cookie jar with them.

I would beg her to tell me the same stories about her childhood, that I’d heard a hundred times before. I then would go to sleep on a cot in the living room. The simplicity of our time together allowed us to really enjoy each other.

She lived alone in this home until she fell and broke her hip, when she was in her early 90’s. She lived until she was 95. She was the first grandparent I lost. It’s only now that I realize what a unique experience it was to know so many of my grandparents, especially my great grandparents.