I don’t think she and grandpa ever owned a camera, so a friend must have taken the candid shot on a Sunday outing. She was probably pregnant with Aunt Annie by then.

        I wonder what her hopes and dreams were than…. before the drudgery of her life of bearing children, washing, ironing, cooking, baking bread, tending a garden and canning wore her down. She eventually had thirteen children. Three died in infancy of childhood diseases, diphtheria and scarlet fever. As the years went by, my mother said the older girls in the family began to scold my grandpa when they realized she was pregnant once again.

        Her story came to me in fragments over the years while I was growing up.   In a conversation, years later when I was an adult, she told me proudly that she had thirteen live births and no miscarriages. 

        The Grandma that I knew as a child stepped out with her right foot and then dragged the left forward, creating a kind of bobbing gait. I remember her shuffling between the kitchen table crowded with grandchildren and the icebox.

        She cut a thick slice of homebaked bread for each of us. She brought out sour cream and apple butter, allowing us to choose. We had already turned down store bought soda crackers, her favorite delicacy. To our Grandma, they represented a treat she didn’t have in the old country. She shook her head in disbelief at her ignorant grandchildren who didn’t recognize a real treat when they saw one.

        A long straight apron covered her shapeless print dress. The dress reached the top of her high-topped black laced shoes. The apron had no decoration, but did have a deep pocket where she pinned her money. She didn’t trust the banks.

        We all knew, each cousin squeezed in around the big round kitchen table, that the real reason we came was for the coffee she gave us. The brew, this latte of our childhood, consisted of about one quarter cup coffee, a half cup of milk and heaping teaspoons of sugar.  With much stirring and sloshing, our spoons clicked happily against our enamel mugs.

        Raising her brown spotted hands, and putting her finger to her lips, she cautioned, “Shh…don’t tell mommy I give you coffee.”

        Our guilty giggles joined her chuckles as a mischievous grin deepened the wrinkles across her face.  Her laughter revealed two teeth, one on the upper right and one on the lower left. We knew she had another one. Many times she had tilted her head, gray hair pulled straight back into a tight bun, and let us peek at her gold molar in the back.

        “What happened to all your teeth,” one of us would ask.

        “You always lose tooth with every baby,” was her reply.

        I often wondered how my Grandma was shortchanged since I knew everyone had thirty-two teeth and she had only given birth to thirteen babies.

        If she saw one of us drop our bread crust, she admonished us “ No, No, Eat…. Eat your crust…make your hair curly!”

        I chose to believe her and religiously ate my crusts, convinced that someday a miracle would happen and my long, straight braids would turn curly on the ends.

        The only one with natural curls was Mary Ann. She accomplished this by regularly hiding her crusts in the little compartments under the table, and having a curly headed Italian daddy. I don’t know what those little built in cubicles beneath the table were originally meant for, but they made great hiding places for the crusts.