Grandma pix

Tomorrow's post, which you're invited to read on Thanksgiving, is all about this woman, my Grandma Dirkse, who married an upstanding young Oostburg businessman named Harry H. Dirkse, a blacksmith with a shop right downtown. One of my earliest childhood memories is of that blacksmith shop, the only light in the place coming from a fire he tended and the open doorway to Main Street. I remember the ringing rhythm of that hammer on the anvil as he fashioned a horseshoe or plowshare. The shop closed up fairly soon after that memory and Grandpa's business became a red horse, Mobilgas filling station. 

Grandma looks like a scrapbook grandma, doesn't she? My oldest sister, Judy, is perfectly darling little girl with her left arm on Grandma's shoulder. Judy is 79 today. Her sister--and my sister, Gail--is the child who looks greatly taken by the book her cousin, Jane, is reading. Gail is 77.

An earlier picture features Grandma Dirkse as a young mom. Gertrude Hartman married Harry H. Dirkse when he was 21 and Grandma was 20, a stenographer, I read somewhere. That's their firstborn, Allan, born in 1915. His sister, my mother, came along in 1918. 

The picture I used--you'll see it again tomorrow if you come around, is the one that follows. Grandma is younger here and likely unmarried. She has a kind of haughty, worldly look, but it's fair to say that she was a good deal more at home in the world than her husband, who came from a more conservative church fellowship--he was Christian Reformed. 

So what's not to love here? She's just a kid whose working joyfully at becoming a woman. She carries herself as if she has some solid sense that she is, well, attractive. Nothing particularly demure of this young lady. It's a given that what she's prepared to say will be witty and memorable.

It's a posed portrait, maybe high school graduation? What you see is a bit of an enlargement--the original measures a bit less than two inches wide and a bit more than three inches tall. 

I wasn't hunting for this one in particular, but when I found it in the pile I knew it was the right one. I'd seen it before in the collection of ancient photographs Grandma herself entrusted me with when she was old and considered me, of all her grandchildren, the one who might care. 

But I'd never really taken the time to look closely at this (what I believe to be) late-adolescent portrait. I'd never turned it over--or if I did I certainly didn't remember what I found on the back. Look.

In a stenographer's handwriting, beneath four stains from some kind of glue--the picture likely came from an album--this little picture says this:

You love Harry

Mabel Hartman

There are more than a few interpretations, of course. Is what's written here intended as a command, as if she's unsure herself and needs to have her courage dialed up? Or is what's written something some friend wrote in, giggling, as if begging young Mabel to admit what everyone else seems already to know? 

Is it in fact her handwriting? Is she simply telling herself what she knows very, very well: "you love him, girl." Just admit it.

Choose what you will. There may well be more. The mystery of who and how and why she wrote what she did, if she did, is a joy, a love story.

The real blessing of those words--last week when I found them and today when I read them again--is that they offer me a Grandma I knew only as a grandma and never as a flirty sweetheart, a young lady somehow in love with a man who would never ever leave her horse's feet unshod. 

The real story of those words is long gone, but the delightful mystery those words beg has even more to say to her grandson's imagination. What a joy really--what a find. Without a dollar more in my pocket, I'm a good deal more wealthy today, having discovered those few clouded words on the back of her picture.

More about her tomorrow.