Morning Thanks--Grandma's stories

"Life is not as predictable as a river," she says, and she grew up along the Missouri, long before that muddy outlaw was dammed up and thereby forcibly restrained. "A river may change its course from time to time," she writes, "but it always ends in the ocean." About that she's right, when it comes to rivers at least; but right about her family's life too. 

Her grandma had stayed behind in Holland, in Friesland, when her husband, Paytrus Tjeerdsma, left for America. Her grandma had reasons--her seven children were married and had children of their own in Friesland. Leaving was quite unthinkable. But when her widowed daughter, with whom grandma lived, remarried, the river took a sudden turn. Grandpa had been begging her to leave the old country and join him in South Dakota. 

But "before definite plans were made, a persistent sore throat had to be checked by the doctor--cancer. Instead of greeting his wife in the adopted land, Grandpa received the traditional black bordered envelope that gave him the sad news that Grandma had died." 

The deliberate way of telling the story may seem callous, but you've got to remember that no one ever taught Hattie Logterman Los how to write stories, and she didn't have much practice. In rural South Dakota in 1910, there was way too much hardscrabble life to live. She was close to 80 when she lifted the pen to put all of that life down onto paper. No one ever taught her how to create a scene or build drama. What you get on the pages of her memoir is instead raw material, the real thing. 

Grandpa Logterman's daughter Dora "worked out" with a neighbor family, which was fine with Dora. But Dora wanted more. She liked the neighbors and their family, but she wanted to be more American, Hattie says in her family memoir, so she "took a job caring for the family of an 'American,'" someone without wooden shoes. This particular "American" owned the grocery store, where "she learned to do things 'the American way,'" Hattie says.

Dora's exercise in multi-culturalism did not banish her from the tight circle of Hollanders from which she'd come. Hattie describes what happened next to that Dutch-American couple in that American store: "There were two young men who seemed to have a greater hunger for candy and cigars. One was. . .Jacob Logterman." And then this: "Jacob had need of a girl like this." 

You know how it is.  A guy has a need. A man gets to a certain age, a certain time in life, and he comes to know that he got to get someone to help with chores. You need to get a wife like you need to get a haircut. 

But there's more:

But, was she interested in him? She seemed happy when she sold cigars to him, but was she just a good clerk? Finally, he could stand it no longer. He asked her if she would go to a barn dance with him. To his surprise, she said, 'yes.'"

Then, this: "To the surprise of both of them, she had never danced a step in her life!" That may be overstatement. After all, Dora Tjeerdsma was Dutch Reformed.

Unmistakably, Hattie Logterman Los, who never really tried her hand at writing, turns up the art a little anyway: "Jacob proved to be a concerned teacher, and few students could match Dora's interest in subject matter and her 'school master'."

That's as close as we'll get to heavy breathing. But that's okay.

All that deliberate high-stepping clearly had consequences: "This proved to be such a successful thing that Jacob decided he should be able to win this young lady." What follows is right down the river bed. "Three months after that first date Jacob decided it was time to 'pop the question.'"

Forty years ago, I sat in Hattie Los's kitchen 500 miles east in Delavan, Wisconsin, and listened to her tell the story. The picture I took back then has her posed as if reading the very same memoir I spent hours with yesterday. Forty years ago I was writing a series of portraits of members of the denomination I'm still a part of, and Grandma Los was suggested as a subject by her preacher. She was, he told me, "Grandma Los" to everyone in church. 

The church matriarch, I thought--sure. Back then, every church had one. Maybe, if blessed, more than just one. 

That's what put me in her kitchen forty years ago. That's why yesterday, I spent my Sabbath afternoon reading her story again, first time after all those years, and loving it just the same.

The river of her life flowed into the gracious arms of her savior. Hattie Logterman Los died nine years later, in 1989. But this morning's thanks are for a story that never really left me, a story of faith and life.