From the Relief Society Magazine, 1960 –

My Third Grandma

By Ilene H. Kingsbury

Part I – Sari

My other Grandmas lived far away, and I saw them briefly once or twice a year.

My third Grandma was in reality my proximity Grandma, for she lived in the next house south. She was not my “blood relation,” but was as deeply beloved, and was known by no other title than Grandma.

Because the freedom of Grandma Morgan’s home was ours, we often played house in the small lean-to off her kitchen. This room was a sort of storage department for Jonathan apples, a sack of bran, a couple of tool chests, old pillow cases of dried plums, and cast-off boxes and trunks. It was cozy and darkish in there. The one small window was more of an excuse than an aid to viewing the scenery. It never seemed to matter to Grandma whether we rearranged the miscellaneous valuables, just so we kept a path down the middle. She insisted on easy access to needed necessities.

I am sure we played in this magic place scores of times, but only one of them remains to excite and enhance my adulthood. Her two little granddaughters and I were planning a show to enrapture the neighborhood. We remembered Grandma’s old box in the lean-to. She called it a portmanteau. Our folks would have said trunk or chest; but it was so battered and insecure looking that box was its final category. Had we been older and wiser and more observant, we could have seen that its hinges were of beaten silver, with odd markings to insure safety on a sea voyage. If we had been taught that a lot of old-fashioned things were really priceless antiques, then we could have preserved this container for the Smithsonian custodians. But I suppose some sincere soul, actuated by the goddess of cleanliness and order, one day kicked that magic box out the door and flung it to the woodpile where it finally became heating material on a cold winter’s night. However, there it was in my childhood, quite unmolested save for dust and dry desert air.

Three little girls, aged eight years, with dreams in their heads, can make quick work of opening up an old-fashioned trunk. They can pull more dress-up things from it than one would ever think it could encase. These lovely legends of style billow and tumble at the feet and get tangled up on the floor until, in a moment, one is almost submerged in wool, cotton, and silk. We grabbed each piece with a shameless selfishness, held each up for size. We smelled some for that peculiar, musty fragrance of age and airless confinement. We unrolled and unfolded fashion’s atrocities and fashion’s beauties, we heartlessly flung aside that which deserved sentimentality and a quiet reverence. But we were only eight.

There was so much to choose from for a childish version of grand opera that we reveled and shouted and tugged and danced about. We hastily drew off and on such marvels of style that we resolved to become store saleswomen when we grew up. It was as if we were thirsty and hungry and here was meat and drink for effulgence. Our braids feathered out, our ribbons hung bedraggled with such pulling up and down of taffeta shirtwaists and lace and fur as we had never before imagined. We gave up the amateur opera for a few moments, just being happy dressing up. Hats with feathers and giant bows graced our brows. Kid gloves, gone from stark white to cream with age, were pushed wrinkling from wrists to armpits. High button shoes, soft leather like a baby’s palm, were made to flap around our shins. We were in our glory.

Then we found it. Coral silk — yards and yards of it. It was rolled up as is a scroll, to save wrinkles and fatal creases. One of us held onto the roll while the other took two corners firmly in hand and backed away from the trunk. Out the door she pranced and right on out to the clothesline. It was not a wide piece of beauty, only about two feet. Along either edge was a border some four or five inches wide of curious gold threads so cleverly woven in with the silk that they gleamed and shimmered and startled the eye with loveliness. When the scarf was entirely spread between us we raised our arms high above our heads, then jerked them down, all to see this pinkish silk flutter and billow and pause in midair as a cloud at sunset. After that we held it to our waists and swung toward each other with little dancing steps taken in small circles which brought us ere long together in a wrapping of gossamer silk. Out again we would swing ourselves, and then repeat the motion as before. The dance of nymphs expert with fibers and sunshine and mist and joy could not have compared with three girls and what they had found in an old trunk.

Too sad that the high note so struck was not the last, or so we felt at the time. It has taken adulthood’s view to say it was better to have it end as it did.

Ecstasy was boundless at the very moment that Grandma Morgan came to the door to throw out the dishwater. At the sight of us she gave out a sort of wail or moan. Such unbelief was heard in her protest at what we were doing to her beloved treasure that we froze in our tracks, dropped the scarf, gathered courage, and started for the shelter of the orchard. She recovered quickly enough to call after us to come back now. We fairly crawled back to her presence, so humble were we and so majestic was she.

She lovingly gathered the length of priceless goods to her heart. As she did so she rolled it up hand over hand in a sort of muff and sat on the back step and cried into its folds. This was absolutely stunning to us. Whoever had seen Grandma with tears in her eyes? We plumped ourselves on the ground in front of her, folded our arms, and waited.

As she crouched over the scarf and wept, she sort of bent forward and looked as if she were shrinking, littler and littler. She wasn’t much bigger than we were anyway, but suddenly we wanted to comfort her and take care of her and straighten her shoulders and make her smile, and be our wonderful Grandma forever and ever. As we leaned toward her she withdrew her hands from the scarf and unwound it a bit and placed a length of it around our shoulders. There we sat in front of her, the long piece tying us together.

Her dark eyes now ceased to cry, and she felt impelled to tell us her story. Her ancestors had ruled India long before the English came to claim it as a protectorate or department or whatever they chose to call their tenure of her land. After that era of great sorrow, war, and adjustment, no one was truly happy in India, neither the British nor the natives. So fallen were the fortunes of her father’s house, that they were the servants where once they had been masters. They were refugees, where once they had been conquerors. At twelve, called a woman in India, she became the personal servant to the wife of a British military officer.

One night as her master and his family were singing hymns in a little arbor in their garden, they were disturbed by a rude knocking at the gate. A guard was sent to investigate, but got no satisfaction from two sailor lads who demanded entrance. The master, therefore, went to quiet the protests of both his man and the intruders. The insistence of the strangers that they come in and join in the singing was listened to and soon all was calm. After the practice the master asked the boys where they had come from. Good Old England, they informed him, just disembarked from nearly a year at sea. He wanted to know why they had come to his home. They said they recognized the hymns and knew Christians lived within the high stone wall surrounding the place.

All this conversation went on while the twelve-year-old servant girl was standing near her mistress gently fanning her to catch the slightest evening breeze. She listened. She was fascinated.

It developed that these two youths were there to beg people to go to America. And had they ever been to America? Well no, but perhaps they might when they no longer sailed the seas. The strange tale unraveled. They were missionaries from the restored Church of Jesus Christ. They would soon have to take ship for other oceans and continents, but others would come to preach the gospel to the pure in heart.

They did sail away, those two emissaries of Christ not yet twenty. The reports they made back in England were responsible for a mission to India. In a new season the long-awaited preachers got to the garden within the high wall in Calcutta, India.

These men with the gospel message started from Salt Lake City, Territory of Utah, United States of America. They traveled by ox team through Nevada and California. They worked their way on sailing ships to India by way of Australia.

They were men who weren’t frightened easily — either by the elements or uncivilized tribes or skeptical colonists. Some had experienced mob atrocities, some had walked hundreds of miles in the Mexican War as part of the Mormon Battalion. They knew deprivation and hardship. Mormons they were, and Mormons they hoped to make all the world.

In India they preached, some for as long as five years. They traveled into the interior by bullock cart and on foot. Few believed, fewer still were courageous enough to join their sect, and still fewer had courage to leave governmental subsidies and posts of authority to emigrate to Zion.

The young native servant girl of India did believe. She did leave her master’s house. She did encircle the globe. She arrived at the end of nearly a year’s journey in a little Mormon settlement in Southern Utah.

Her belongings, or possibles as she called them, were meager, unobtrusive, and scarcely of any value at all. Her little metal studded trunk became battered in holds of sailing vessels. It became so beaten that no one assumed its contents were of merit. But underneath the more mundane articles of current wearing apparel an inquisitive hand could have found a curved, carved, ivory-handled sword wrapped in a misty, gleaming length of gold embroidered coral silk. That sari of South India had come a long, long way.

But it was out of place on a western frontier. Somber living was the end result of harsh toil. One could remember when the only bright trimming in the whole community was a bit of red flannel contributed by a gracious lady who had formerly called it a petticoat. But a swatch of silk of such gaiety and loveliness was not countenanced. It had remained in the little trunk for nearly two generations when we snatched it and flung it in the sunshine. No wonder Grandma cried. The rush of memories of a most amazing past was enough to break her reserve. As she talked, we knew what the butcher knife meant to her. The silk and the steel were symbols of her father’s house.

Reluctantly we unwound the sari from our shoulders, we laid it reverently in her lap and noted its high brilliance. We had been clad in coral.

We thought about going home to tell our mothers. Surely they should know all about the wonderful things Grandma Morgan had told us. But as we got to the gate we slowed down. As we stepped beneath the orchard shade we came to a complete stop. We looked at each other. Maybe we should keep all this a secret until we were old and someone called us Grandma.

(To be continued)