Gramma Koftan

Gramma Koftan was short and stout, meaning not fat but certainly not skinny, corseted solidly, thin-lipped, once red-haired, extremely industrious, argumentative from her family's side, wrote poetry of the Edgar Guest kind and had Guest and Service poems well memorized from her father's social literary gatherings. "A House by the Side of the Road" hung on her living room wall. The first verse was:

Let me live in a house by the side of the road where the race of men go by,/ The men who are good and the men who are bad, as good and as bad as I. / I would not sit in the scorner's seat or hurl the cynic's ban./ Let me live in a house by the road and be a friend to man.

She and Mom recited such verse as James Whitcomb Riley's "When the Frost Is on the Punkin" and "Little Orphant Annie," which the first verses for each are:

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock,/ And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin' turkey-cock,/ And the clackin' of the guineys, and the cluckin' of the hens,/ And the rooster's hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence;/ O, it's then's the times a feller is a-feelin' at his best,/ With the risin' sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,/ As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock,/ When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

Little Orphant Annie's come to our house to stay,/ An' wash the cups an' saucers up, an' brush the crumbs away,/ An' shoo the chickens off the porch, an' dust the hearth, an' sweep,/ An' make the fire, an' bake the bread, an' earn her board-an'-keep;/ An' all us other childern, when the supper-things is done,/ We set around the kitchen fire an' has the mostest fun,/ A-listenin' to the witch-tales 'at Annie tells about,/ An' the Gobble-uns 'at gits you Ef you don't watch out!

Cousin Linda had Gramma's poems printed and bound, which I can't find at the moment; but they follow this kind of versification that Aunt Audree and her granddaughter were/are most persistent in imitating. Gramma also played the piano passably well, undoubtedly a big help to Mom's singing, and it was her upright I learned on.

She'd begun teaching country school out of the eighth grade, as did her older and younger sisters, setting up the teaching tradition that Mom and I followed. Great Aunt Nellie married John Feddersen, who was superintendent at Stuart, Nebraska, I think; she also mimegraphed her own teacher's magazine for the area, the copies of which Mom had and I enjoyed for the playlets, the seasonal diagrams for coloring, as well as various hints for different courses of study. One of her two sons was later head of the Speech Department at Northwestern University. Great Aunt Myrtle taught at Stuart, and, after divorce, for a century or so at Randolph, where their brother was the town doctor (and Great Uncle Glenn had taught briefly at some point before he became a doctor). A very voluble quartet, I think of them as the Peters Debating Society, for they liked nothing better than to hone their minds and tongues, generally on politics, swarming a hapless Republican like army ants with their Democratic fervor.

Gramma was a hard-working farm wife who baked her own bread and cakes and pies and put out big meat-and-potato meals for Grampa, including breakfast, and ran the separator for milk, cream, and butter, always had hens for eggs and meat, took care of a large garden, canned enough to keep the dug-out cellar full of food for the winter from beef to peas and carrots, yet also belonged to various clubs, ultimately to become a Royal Neighbors of America deputy, meaning a regional insurance saleswomen, who had her first martini in San Francisco at a national meeting not many years before her death. I generally picture her in a bib apron with rickrack edging she'd made herself, though, of course, she dressed up in print jersey with a hat for Project Club, Bloomfield Womens Club, Royal Neighbors fraternal meetings, not quite so fancy for their farm couples' card club.

Mom said she was much more difficult to get along with in their youthful years when Gramma was a very strict, stern black-stockinged Methodist in the Twenties, though I always thought of her as affectionate if sharp-tongued. I do have some black-stockinged photos of her with her Harry Potter glasses. Linda said I was her favorite. Actually, I was simply the oldest grandchild, a very well-behaved one because of Mom, as well as very literate. She was sharp-tongued with me to insure I didn't become a snob, especially after I went to college, and skewered me accordingly, as she could anyone verbally. (Sorry, Gram, with my Forties and Fifties standards, I am just what you feared.) We got along mostly grandly because I was an avid reader and she liked to know about the world. This worked out especially well on our trips, when she depended upon me to know the background for what we saw. And that's where I'll go next.