Young Maudie

Maudie was born toward the end of the century before the last century, in the 1880s. She never spoke of her earliest childhood. There was a large, extended family, scattered in several states. She had sisters, older I’d guess, maybe one younger than she, possibly even a brother who must have died young. Her father was a strict, “bible-thumping, hell-and-brimstone” patriarch. A preacher? Maybe. Certainly devout enough to have been one. And Maudie’s religious upbringing centered around some rigorously applied doctrine. Her references made it sound Pentecostal, evangelical, fundamentalist---perhaps all of them rolled into one.

She lived church, hymns, strict rules and--per her times--an ironclad sense of what young ladies must be. Her household was not a poor one. Maybe not rich, as we would recognize it now, but well off, wanting for little—except the freedom to be individuals. Maudie took from this, into her future identity, an aversion to church-going, but not to believing. She also kept a habit of singing hymns to pass the hours of work. No radio then, no television or iPods. The day was filled with parlor visits, needlework, baking the daily bread, scrubbing the floors--literally by hand--and rubbing them to a shine with blocks of paraffin, and coal oil.

Education was perfunctory. I can recall her laboriously “doing her sums” as she maintained her household budget, in the days I knew her. She could do math, but struggled with it—calculators were not even a dream then. And she learned how to read, but read with the same extreme effort as she did sums. She informed me several times that reading was pretty easy for her. If she came to a word she didn’t know, she “called it grindstone” and went on reading. The rest of the text usually defined the unknown word. If she’d learned a “copperplate” cursive, she’d long lost it to arthritis.

But miserably as she recalled the parents (really parent, I never heard much about her mother) she loved her siblings dearly. They still lived in Missouri, I think, and corresponded by letter, regularly. Her face would light, a time would be set aside for the event, and their letters would be read over and over at the kitchen table.

I know she enjoyed light, happy times, even though the family was strict. She told me snippets of her visit to the World’s Fair, in St. Louis--the largest ever held. It was in 1904 and boasted the likes of John Phillip Sousa, Thomas Edison, and Scott Joplin as attendees. She had a couple of mementos purchased there, that had pride-of-place in her dining room décor. She owned some pieces of furniture, given by family as wedding gifts, and as heirlooms, that were extremely good pieces, expensively made, lovingly cared for. She had been raised repressively, genteelly, righteously. And when she grew up, met a man to love, and married---she became the daughter we’d rather not speak of. That new era is for next time. .