Generations

My great-grandmother's house had what I liked to think of as a parlor. I suppose most people would call it a living room, but with the roses blooming on the wallpaper and the old pump organ in the corner, it was everything I imagined a parlor to be.

I never met my great-grandmother, but my grandma's sister, my great-aunt Esther, lived in that old farmhouse her whole life, looking after her mother throughout the stages of what might have been Alzheimer's and tending the cows in the pasture and the flowers lovingly planted all around the yard. Esther never married, and though I was too young to really talk about such things with her, I think she must have been lonely sometimes. My grandma said she fancied a young man at one time, but he thought of her more as a sister than a potential bride and married another.

Esther was a true salt-of-the-earth woman. She was small and reed-thin, with skin ruddy from the sun and wind and gray hair cropped just below her ears. In my mind she always wore a cotton dress with an apron, knee-high stockings, and black buckled shoes, and her voice crackled when she talked. All those years she lived in that house, she never installed indoor plumbing but instead used the little outhouse from her childhood. She had a small pump for water in the kitchen, but my siblings and I especially enjoyed helping Esther get water from the big pump out in the pump house.

Though my grandma had two sisters, neither had children of their own, so my dad was the only child among the three, and from what I've heard, my dad's aunts adored their red-headed nephew like no other. When he was a kid, my dad spent time during the summers out at Esther's farm building playhouses in the fields and chasing after his dog Penny. He also spent time keeping his grandma company so Esther could get her work done. Esther's mother, I'm told, was in the habit of wandering off, so Esther would bring her along when she did her chores around the farm and try to keep her occupied by having her hold the tails of the cows while Esther milked them.

It was during those summers when my dad and his grandma sat in the parlor and played church. I'm sure my dad knows the story much better than I do, but I've heard he preached many a sermon long before the idea of attending seminary ever sparked his imagination. And my great-grandmother sang the hymns so deeply embedded in her memory the dementia couldn't touch them. I can envision the scene in my mind so clearly--a little freckled-faced boy and his grandma enjoying time with their Savior.

Fast-forward some forty years, and the scene isn't that different. The youngest son of the freckled-face boy is standing on a small platform in the living room of his house wearing a "gown" his grandma made from an old white dress and preaching a sermon on John 3:16. The sermon is followed by his older sister plunking out "Silent Night" and "Glory Be To Jesus" (the only two hymns she can play with both hands) on the piano, while both children sing the words they know by heart.

What started in the parlor of the old farmhouse continued in the living room of the house in the suburbs. That's powerful stuff.