So, do you remember I was taking note of the ornaments on my special sitting room tree? Well, I didn’t forget; I just wandered off in other areas for awhile. This little embroidered material is from many decades ago. I did it while sitting on the enclosed front porch of our house in LaGrange County – in the little village of Scott – with my grandmother sitting beside me doing her own piece, something with French knots, I think.
That would have been in the fifties; yes, I decided to go ahead and get graphic with the numbers. The porch is, for the most part, the same as it was then, and often my mother and I sit out there and read or do sudokus. I did a lot of embroidery over the years and then my fingers started to tingle when I would hold the needle and so I finished up the project I was on and didn’t do another.
I was going to say a few things about Grandma, but I got sidetracked again. She was born in 1881 in Lima, Indiana (now Howe) to Wesley Wisler and Martha Fowler Wisler. My mother wasn’t born until 1926, so I had a pretty direct link to the real horse and buggy days. I remember the way she smelled – clean and starched – and it does seem odd that someone I knew so well and loved so dearly is a complete stranger to those in my life now, with the exception of my mother.
Heavens, I didn’t mention her name. It was Jessie Ethel Wisler. I used to giggle at the the Ethel part. She was named after her father’s brother Jesse who moved to Mancelona, Michigan and started a business. She was first married to Harry Huff and had two children, Lucile Elizabeth and Stanley Malcolm. Harry died of Bright’s Disease and some years later she married my grandfather, John Michael Shimp.
Grandpa had been married before also and his wife had died following a miscarriage; she had been all right when he left the hospital, but when he got home, they called with the message she had bled to death. (I didn’t feel like spelling hemorrhaged, but then felt I was being a chicken so here it is.) It changed him, this event. They say he withdrew into himself. He died when I was 10 and they found he had one of my school pictures in his wallet. I remember hearing Grandma say, “He must have picked it up off the table.”
I have some pictures of him in his youth. In one he is sitting on a thresher, I think in a coat, tie and hat; I know that at one time he traveled out to the Dakotas with a crew, harvesting grain. I’ll have to scan them into my computer, along with my grandmother’s graduation photo.
But back to the embroidery. I don’t think we ever framed it; I think I just kept it folded up in some drawer or box or maybe both at one time or another. At any rate, I found it in my thirties, stuck it in a hoop and hung it on a nail. Then we moved and I stuck it in a drawer. When this tree went up and I was looking for stuff to put on it, I thought, “Why not.”
I close my eyes and I can be on that porch again in one of the summers when my age was still in the single digits. And it is a nice thing to have tucked away in my memory box.
