Startling statistics show that people in the US, well, down to people in the Southwestern States, or actually in and around Oklahoma (You've got the whole world it could be, but we will be real and acknowledge those we care about, or sell to, buy from or we don't know about their living conditions in Wyoming, or New York, or the State of California, where the seeming weird are rich and the richer get richer, yet they seem to do without the things that enrich them ) but by holding it here to home, we can look and understand the rights and wrongs of it all.
My grandmother, Grandma O'Bera (Vera) Taylor Peck, born in 1907 or 1908 was one of 15 children. Her mother and father worked and labored and brought kids into this world, and rarely had an extra penny for any of them. They were given clothes, that were handed down by the one above them in age. Their boots and shoes were something they wore to church or town, they were barefooted a good portion of the time, and each child began working on the farmland that was owned by someone else, and made their two or three cents a day, that all went in to a pot, and allowed some things to be bought.
They were poor. They had multiple kids in one bed. They had 15 chairs and no two alike. They had 4 or 5 beds in one room. They bathed in tin wash tubs, They wore their hair up and turned, there were dresses that could have been 15 years old when the youngest started wearing them. They ate beans everyday. They scalded and cut and cured their pork. Not a piece of meat would go to waste. Milk would come from the one cow. Some of the children died very young. Some died at twenty. Others survived the dieases of the early teens, the depression of times in the thirties (that some would say lasted until the fifties).
I saw her in the 50's. 60's. 70's, 80's, 90's right up to 2006. She never HAD anything.
A few dresses. Her hair bun she had made. Her eyeglasses. Her small bits and tiny things, buttons, half dollars, ribbons, a hair comb, a brush. The old 2nd hand cabinet, the plaster picture, the paintings from a daughter in law, the painting her son sent home from Japan) everything in her house was used the day it came inside. Drinking from Mason jars, washing your hands in a porcelain pan, the wood framed cabinet with two doors and a drawer that her dishes were kept in, that was built in the late 1800's and was painted so thick with many coats of whitewash paint.
You knew this was coming: Grandma carried each of her children, their children, the great grandchildren by name, by picture, with the purest heart, the voice of no complaint, the love and special love that could possibly be given by anyone, in any place, in any time. And she carried each one in her prayers. Daily, wrapping them all up at night. Starting on them again in the morning.
How could she have been any wealthier ?
Ralph Peck
Photo by Ralph Peck
Grandma's Pretties
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