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| Edith & A.J. |
The DeMans emigrated from East Flanders, Belgium just before my great grandmother, Sophia, gave birth to Adolph in 1885. Adolph's father, Eduardus, passed away when Adolph was 9, forcing him to leave school and work in the iron mines of Republic, Michigan.
Land was available in Alberta, Canada, so Grandpa moved there, farming in the 1910's, inventing a steam-powered wheat harvesting machine that must not have worked well enough to make a fortune.
More importantly, he met my eventual grandmother, Edith, a nurse on one of Admiral Robert Perry's expeditions, but not the one that researchers now say didn't quite make it to the North Pole. (My mom was born in Medicine Hat, Alberta in 3/'24, giving me almost automatic Canadian citizenship should I need it.)
Grandpa or A.J., as we all called him, saved every penny from his farming work in Canada and bought 1/4 of a homestead, 40 acres, in Maple Valley, Washington, wonderful Douglas Fir-covered property with Mount Rainier staring it in the face everyday.
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| Mount Rainier viewed from Maple Valley, Washington |
Grandpa raised a family of six on that 1/4 homestead through the Great Depression, working any jobs he could get, but mostly growing the food they needed, raising cows, pigs, chickens and a horse that liked to buck me off into the mud.
A.J. was an irreverent Catholic, chiding the priest who came to sprinkle holy water on his fields: "Father, don't you think you'd do more good with a load of manure?"(Grandpa later converted to a fundamentalist religion, but once told me that Protestants were simply "Catholics in protest.")
The lifeline of the property was a huge garden, in itself, enough to sustain life for a family of six and those who followed, at least 1/3rd of an acre, maybe more; tilled, fertilized, weeded, cultivated daily.
I'll forget much, but I can remember white potatoes, red potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, radishes, parsnips, turnips, celery, lettuce, cabbage, sweet peas, green beans, not to mention the raspberries, strawberries, black caps, squash, spinach and watermelon. Outside the garden, there were fruit trees of apricot, peach, apple and plum, wonderful thimble berries along the driveway that circled the garage.(All of the waste from his animals and organic material from his compost pile went into the garden, along with a judicious use of lime. . no pesticides that I noticed.)
Self-sufficiency, that's the word. The two-story woodshed behind the house had nails of every size and description that Grandpa had straightened after removing them from every wooden box or container he encountered, also lumber in various sizes and other components, a grinding wheel I could make spin like crazy with a hand crank to shape wood into sharp weapons.
Barrels were set up strategically at the corner of the woodshed roof to capture "soft" water for washing clothes, etc. Screens were set up to shovel rocks and dirt through, getting gravel of a certain denomination on the other side.
The woodshed had mostly fir logs for the old stove that heated the house, but cedar for the kindling. I used to love to take the axe and split the cedar for kindling, but, I remember Grandpa frequently telling me "that's enough kindling for a while Jimmy."
The wooden garage was where Grandpa kept his '50 Ford. An escape hatch on the floor of the garage allowed Grandpa to go beneath the garage floor, drain the car's oil into a container, then mix that old oil with kerosene to make starting fluid for the cook stove/heater.
Grandpa and my aunts found it funny that I'd use the outhouse behind the woodshed instead of the indoor plumbing. I couldn't explain it then, but using that quaint old wooden building with the previous year's Sears-Roebuck catalog nailed to the wall made me think about the history of the place where my mom and others were raised.
Grandpa's attic, in the two story house he built by hand and is still standing, regally, was the most intriguing spot for me; old newspapers bundled by year, barrels holding fermenting dandelion wine, beet wine and sauerkraut, memorabilia from kids born in the 20's.
I'd already paid off my car by my 16th birthday, a '59 VW, and I would take Grandpa to Seattle's Pike Place Market, yeah, where they throw the fish around for a show. Grandpa would buy salt herring and hard tack.(Hard tack was like a huge, circular rye crisp with a hole in the center to hang it on a nail on the wall. Salt herring was something Grandma didn't allow in her kitchen.)
Grandma made soap from hog fat and lye, butter from the raw cow's milk, canned every damn thing from the garden into Mason jars for the pantry,
My covenant, agreement, contract with Grandma was that anytime I picked a pail of berries, she would make a pie. I loved mixing up the blackberries, gooseberries, huckleberries that grew around the garage and running to Grandma to demand she fulfill her end of the bargain. She NEVER let me down.
One more thing: My Grandpa, A.J., with very little formal education, was a self-educated wordsmith. After a days work, he would sit in his rocking chair next to the wood stove, with a Holy Bible and Webster's Dictionary at his side. He'd used a red/blue pencil to underline nearly every scripture in that Bible from Genesis to Revelation and much of the dictionary as well.
He stopped me one day, when I was about 12, to explain a passage in Genesis, saying that Adam and Eve were more than merely naked in the garden, but "nude," a word he likely felt more accurately captured the shame they felt breaking God's law. I responded that they were more than naked or nude, but had they'd both been "exposed."
Grandpa responded: "Oh, that's really good, Jimmy!" writing my suggestion in the margin of his Bible.
Addendum: My grandparents, without a single word, taught me how a marital partnership could work. Grandma Edith would serve A.J. breakfast in a breakfast nook surrounded by multi-paned windows.
A.J. would cool the hot coffee, placing it in a saucer and blowing on it, then eat his pancake, sausage and egg. . . Afterward, he'd kiss his wife on the forehead, saying: "Oh, that was wonderful, Edith!"
They both worked tirelessly in their marriage, even in the later years, as I witnessed. She did everything inside, cooked the meals, cleaned the house and the clothing. . . he did the outside work; fed the animals, dynamited the stumps, worked the garden. did the household repairs. . . . . subconsciously, I wanted what they had, working on it every day for 49.5 years with my first wife and now, nearly 6 with my second.
If I'm anything resembling a man today, it's because of emulating A.J. DeMan.
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Beautiful childhood. We need gardens for our children, we need animals for the children and we need good examples for our children. Now, kids do not do much and most have a phone and a laptop. They are smart.
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