Whistle and Whittle

Granpa Hall was in his nineties when I met him. I remember him most for his songs. He sang Keemyo Kimeo, sing sang Kitty catch-e kime-oooooo

And he sang Lukey's boat is painted green

And he sang Down by the Greenwood Sideo

In the winter, he'd sit by the stove in a chair he'd made and caned with hickory he'd cut and slice and soak and bend. He sat by the fire because he got cold very easily once he was that old. I thought it was wise of him, when he was young, to think to make himself a chair to sit in once he got old. He'd sit and he'd whittle. He didn't carve. He'd whittle a stick until there wasn't anything left of the stick, just a pile of shavings.

And he'd whistle. Sometimes, he'd whistle a whole song and come in just under his breath with a few of the words. He knew all the words though to all those songs. But whittling went with whistling.

It was a good thing to do in the winter. It was ever bit as good as shoveling snow -- which is what I do in the winter -- and it accomplishes just as much.

My Grandma didn't sit and whittle or whistle. I think she believed that a whistling woman and a crowing hen, either will come to some bad end. My Mom would hum, sometimes, but she didn't whistle either. She didn't whistle, except to teach me how to put a blade of grass between my thumbs and blow on that, and except to take a piece of elderberry wood and split it and put a blade of grass between there and blow on that, and except to show me how to take a comb and put a piece of wax paper behind it and to blow on that. None of that was whistling proper, though.

That was what my Grandpa Hall knew. He knew how to whistle proper.

In my Grandparent's one room built to itself out behind the house where they raised their kids, there was a cookstove that heated up the place in the winter. There was a front door and there was a window on the right of the room and one on the left of the room. Right across from that front door was the stove and a table sitting finenth the stove. Finenth is an old time word my Grandma said. It means right nearby. She would tell me to put the kindlin finenth the stove.

Grandpa passed on by the time I was ten years old and then there was just Grandma in that house. Sometimes she'd find a little piece of shaving and it made her stop and wonder. Grandma could sit and stare off into nothing the longest that I'd ever seen. But she didn't sit too long. We'd go walking.

We'd walk down the hill and across the swinging bridge and visit some distant cousin over there. Or we'd walk down Maple Street and go on down past the Tannery School and up Little Laurel. We'd walk right past the bridge that later figured in to how Grandma died. Fortunately, we didn't know about the part that bridge would play. We liked to stand on it for a moment and look at the water. She didn't talk too much and I did. I'd say how the light was on the water and what it seemed like. Grandma once told me I was allowed to not talk if I wanted to keep some of my thoughts in my head where thoughts ought to be.

Sometimes, I'd fall to silence like Grandma, a little skinny girl beside a little skinny woman, both walking along with our walking sticks and looking wise. I practised looking wise in case we met anyone, which we mostly didn't. If we had, I would have lost the look pretty quick. I was what they called a little bit backward. That just meant you weren't forward. And that just meant you were quiet around people you didn't know. I had just barely stopped hiding behind my mother's skirts by this time. I was more at home in the woods than anywhere else.

In those days I would have said I was more to home, rather than more at home. It took a big city and a lot of reading to get some of those old phrases turned around. I still come upon some of them occasionally, reading something I wrote. I still have trouble putting an s on the end of mile if something is more than one mile from something else. The word, yonder, still makes sense to me and sometimes I set my mind to keep these words that are still good and still have a lot of wear left in them.

My Grandma Hall is the one taught me some of the words. She didn't say, "Look here, this is a word you can use". She used certain words and had a way of saying that I picked up because we hung out together. I would have dressed like her in a heartbeat but I wore what I had. Grandma wore long dresses and button-up boots. Her boots came from another era. She took care of them. My Grandpa had made them for her and she wore them everywhere and had them resoled when they needed it. My favorite one of her dresses was a dark shiny material and it had little pinpricks of white on it and it had jet buttons all down the front. She'd put it on over her regular dress when we went to church or to town or somewhere. She'd sometimes wear one dress over another dress over another dress.

At night, she'd take her long, never-ever-cut hair down from the amber combs that held it up all day and she'd brush it out and braid it. Her hair was not soft -- it was wiry. But it was very long and very curly, even though it was long.

By the time I was in her life, she had long ago left off cooking. She'd raised her kids and now there was just her and sometimes me, when I'd go down to keep her company. We'd have storebought cereal with canned cream on it. The cheerios were always stale and the cornflakes were chewy. I didn't mind that. She'd sometimes come up to our house for pinto beans and biscuits. But she would leave a dime on the table to pay for her coffee because she didn't want to be beholding to anyone.

We never stayed too long inside the house. We'd go walking. When she did talk, it was only a sentence or two. She told me the road was washing away. I looked at it right where it always was. She said it was a wide road a long time ago and the bank on the upper side was washing down and sliding over it, little by little. It would take a lifetime to see what she meant, but now that more than half a lifetime has passed for me, I do see what she was talking about. Plus now they've paved overtop the cobblestones, so that old road isn't there at all anymore.

But Grandma is still there. Every time I walk that road, Grandma walks with me. I see her as plain as I see the shape of the hills the way they've always been and the way I see the cobblestones underneath that cracking pavement and just as Grandma, when she'd find those shavings of wood saw my Grandpa, gone for years, wistling and whittling in his hickory slat chair beside the wood fire.