Paula Wearing the Bracelet as Necklace

Having the bracelet in my hands, on my wrist, around my neck, enjoying family talk with Sue, looking at old pictures and trying to reconstruct a family tree, I was consciously aware of the weight of our ancestors, and the connection among all the cousins. The memories I have of Gram are many and varied, and several have been mentioned already: her house in Syracuse, her brown suit, all the mittens, her willingness to get down on the floor and hang out with us. And when we were teenagers, she seemed so much more understanding than our parents were about, well, everything. Gram rightly criticized my impulsiveness, but I think she also loved my spontaneity.

Just the other day while I was knitting, I remembered that although my mom got me started, Gramma taught me to purl, how to pick up dropped stitches, and bind off. And how to tie my shoes––those awful Buster Brown oxfords I was forced to wear for so many years. Being a stuffed-animal girl, I neglected my dolls when girls all around me were playing “Mothers” with theirs––until Gram started making them doll clothes and showed me how. That was a big pastime for me as a kid, and it’s not surprising that when I grew up, making stuff took precedence over motherhood.

I also remember playing hours of “Old Maid,” and “Authors,” with both her and Grampa on dark February days when I was home from school for Lincoln’s or Washington’s birthday (we got both, back then), or being sick, which I was, a lot. Or maybe I faked it to stay home with Gram. And we made valentines, too, and walked to the mailbox to send them to my cousins. From summertime, I remember her making strawberry jam at our house, and the phenomenon of the cooled paraffin on top of the jars. My dad, was a big fan of her doughnuts, but, alas, not much else she cooked. Frankly, Gramma had few standards for food preparation.

When I was a grad student in Syracuse, Gram was still very much alive. It was the early 1970s, the Viet Nam Era, the time of Hawks and Doves, peace marches and Nixon. My phone rang almost nightly, predictably, right after the news. It was always Gramma. “I just had to call you up and SPUTTER! she’d say, sincerely angry. “I just had to SPUTTER!” about the war, Watergate, our President. Really, there’s no better term for what she was doing. Lately, I find myself using it to explain an irresistible urge to rant about political stupidity. I recommend it.

When we talk about our family, we think of ourselves as “Stellmans.” But when we look at the family lineage, it’s the Elliot line that gets the attention, with all their existing documents and pictures and DAR status. As an old Brattleboro family, the Elliots gave several luminaries to the 19^th-century humanitarian circles of New England. Not until the immigrant cabinetmaker Louis Heinrich Stellman married a young Elliot girl named Rose, and had a son named Louis who married The-Woman-Not-Yet- Known-as-Gram, did we have a chance to become “the Stellmans.”

Gramma was born a Blodgett. She grew up poor.. Born in 1885 in Gardner, MA, she and her siblings were child labor for a furniture factory, caning chair-seats at home when they were very young. She never forgot how; she fixed several chairs in my parents’ dining room, and I wish she’d taught me. It’s a dying craft. Their mother’s name was Lucy Brown. And their father, Eugene, was a shoemaker who moved the family to Brattleboro at some point. The big family lived outside of town, on Tater Lane, without indoor plumbing or electricity. And Eugene was an atheist with an annotated Bible beneath his cobbler’s bench, who, according to the stories, would pull it out and harangue his captive clients. That Bible is still in our family. So is the old Elliot one. While the Elliots recorded their begats, the senior Blodgett reasoned against the Almighty.

Oddly, although her father wasn’t a religious man, he was evidently a very strict moralist. Gramma told me once that he beat his daughters for trimming their homemade muslin petticoats with the red-dyed stripe that typically edged the store-bought fabric at the time.

I wish I knew how Gram and Grampa met, from such different backgrounds, such different standings in the town. From age 18, she was a one-room schoolteacher in Brattleboro, and a little bit older than he was. He went to college. The illustrious family didn’t know, ever, that when Louis Stellman married Corinne Blodgett on September 29, 1909, Gram was three months pregnant with my mother, Evelyn. They moved to Syracuse right afterward, and Gram kept that secret until she died. Ev found out in the 80s when she got a look at her original birth certificate and detected that her father had forged it. She was really born sometime in March. For my own little family, August 1^st has become Ev’s Birthday Observed.

Whatever Gramma felt at that time, when premarital pregnancy meant disgrace, I remember that Evie felt awful for her. And now, reflecting, so do I. But my mother’s biggest concern, which made us laugh after she said it, was, “Please don’t let my sister Barbara know.” . . .  

If I’d been a little cleverer, I might have guessed, since when Gram reminisced to us Flower Children about sex in her day, her remark, with a characteristic snort, was, “Oh, of course we did it; we just didn’t talk about it.”

Oh, they did it. A lot. They made all of “the Stellman girls” who became our mothers, who, with the help of the rather marginal fathers, ended up making all of us. The rest is history.

If we write it down.

PS: Another small factoid: one of Gram's (younger?) brothers, Alton, came out here to teach school in the early 20th century, to Yakima (Nowhere), WA. There are still Blodgetts there.  Never met one.