RELATIONSHIPS

Harriet and Wilmer, and daughters Elizabeth and Susan moved from eastern Colorado when Jenny was seven. The dust bowl was even more cruel in eastern Colorado and their attempts at ranching and farming there had to be abandoned. When Daddy learned that a widow’s farm about two miles away was selling for a song, he promptly notified his brother. Warren felt great affection for his older brother Wilmer, who had been in the worst of trench warfare in France and was wounded in the shoulder. When he recovered from his wound in an army hospital in the states and returned to Kansas, somewhat changed, he and Warren batched together on a farm. Warren remembered how hard it had been for Wilmer; he had nightmares about the war and would curse in his sleep.

Wilmer had met Harriet, his nurse , while in the hospital, and they had kept in touch. They were married at about the same time Warren and Mae were. Mae was pretty and petite and her parents had been prosperous farmers. She had finished high school and taught school for three years. Harriet was a plain raw-boned woman whose parents had migrated from Holland and made a meager living on a farm in Iowa. She was clever and accomplished and ruthlessly ambitious, and now that she had her man, she was determined to better their circumstances and and satisfy her longing for prestige and recognition. She would soon be on her way up in the world. As soon as their first daughter Elizabeth was born, she decided Elizabeth was destined for greatness, and having an interest in drawing herself, decided she would impart this knowledge to Elizabeth so that Elizabeth might someday become a great artist. Elizabeth proved an apt student, and by the time they moved to Kansas, she was said to have talent.

Margaret and Elizabeth had both been born about six years after their parent’s marriages and were only thirteen days apart. Jenny was born six months.earlier than Susan. At first Jenny was reserved toward Susan who called everyone kid, as Jenny had never had a close friend of her own outside the family, but they soon became fast friends. Margaret and Elizabeth, both eleven, became friends at once. The four girls had glorious time playing together; they were well matched in ages, imagination and ingenuity. It was double fun during the times when the four could play together.

The older girls could do more things, had more ideas, and the two younger girls were happy to tag along in their shadows. The circumstances seemed ideal for those childhood friendships that last a lifetime, a priceless and wonderful gift.

Perhaps it was not deliberate or well understood by herself, but Harriet had a deep seated need to prove herself superior to women like Mae. As the relationship between the two families progressed, she would take opportunities to put Mother down in a disguised veneer of nicety. She would interrupt a stimulating conversation to say, “And how are your your chickens doing Mae?” or “Did you put out a big garden this year?” or “How do you make your canned peaches look so beautiful?” not waiting for the answers. Mother saw through this at once, but it always hurt her, because she recognized that Harriet was a bright woman like herself, but Mother wasn’t as aggressive. In so many ways she liked and admired Harriet and had been so happy that she was moving to Kansas.

Jenny loved the house where Uncle Wilmer’s family lived. It had a large bay window in the south of the living room. There were oval braided rag rugs on the floor which Aunt Harriet had made. There was a soft plush rust colored divan with many pillows. Best of all, there were two small bookcases full of books, not used school textbooks, such as those in the box in the closet at Jenny’s house, but children’s and adult’s classics. This seemed a wealth of books to Jenny. All they had at Jenny’s was a story of the Bible and last year’s school books. Elizabeth and Susan had their own bedroom and a also a playroom which had nothing in it but their toys. They had a kaleidoscope and a toy elephant named Herbert Hoover. They could play here without messing up the whole house. A pair of real wooden shoes from Holland sat by their door. It was a house such as one read about in story books.

Aunt Harriet was an excellent seamstress and did her sewing in a small room they called the spare room. She had made a blue taffeta dress for Susan with bright pink lining that Jenny thought was just gorgeous. She made a dark green princess style coat for Susan that fit her like the paper on the wall. Jenny wore a hand me down coat of Margaret’s that was out of style. Susan wore her hair in two thin straw colored pigtails that made her look like the little Dutch girls of her Mother’s ancestry.

Jenny longed for pigtails and princess style coats. Aunt Harriet had made a doll house for her girls from a wooden box, with the help of Uncle Wilmer. It was wallpapered and partitioned and furnished and open at the top for accessibility. It was great fun on a cold or rainy day.

Once when Jenny stayed overnight with Susan,. they slept in the spare room, so they could have a room to themselves. The ceiling had leaked and had left interesting shapes from the water. Lying underneath, Jenny and Susan found fanciful pictures in the ceiling before drifting off to sleep. Overnights at Susan’s were always a great treat as was having Susan overnight with her. Sometimes the big girls overnighted at one of the houses and the little girls overnighted at the other.

On a long hot summer day the girls would walk to each other’s houses and come back later in the evening. The visiting girls were sure to be joyfully met by the other two. One time Elizabeth and Susan walked to visit them under a large black parasol, that their grandmother, who was there on a visit, had insisted they should carry. That same day they were all playing in the hayloft when they conceived the idea of having a circus there. They would call it “The Barnes and Sisters Circus.” It would make them famous. They would have booths and acts and lemonade and popcorn and invite people for miles around, or maybe they would put an ad in the paper and pass out handbills. It was a pipe dream, but it didn’t prevent them from a sweaty afternoon of sweeping up the pigeon droppings and the dust in an effort to make the hayloft presentable. Sometimes they would pick mulberries from the trees at Margaret and Jenny’s, eating as they picked and getting hands lips and sometimes clothing deep purple. One time while exploring the large rugged pasture on Uncle Wilmer’s’s place, they discovered what they thought was a new kind of grasshopper. It looked as though it were made of sticks and had a strange triangular head. The older girls had visions of grandeur about how famous they would become from their new discovery. They hurried to the house for a jar and bravely collected their specimens. When Aunt Harriet saw them she said, “We called those, 'Devil’s Darning Needles'.” Jenny later learned they were praying mantises. The somewhat disappointed girls took their fearsome captives back to the pasture and released them.

Jenny liked Aunt Harriet, but didn’t appreciate her condescension toward Mother. She had an interesting way of looking at things and was creative and inventive. Once when Jenny stayed for
lunch and the larder was low, she showed them how to make four banana sandwiches from one large banana and bread and butter. She had learned this trick from a girl on a train, who shared her lunch with her. She thought up colorful names for pets and toys. She had read many great classics and had studied Latin and German and was conversant in Friesan Dutch. She wrote in a beautiful flowing hand and was an avid letter writer. She invited Jenny’s family for an impromptu evening meal and served soda crackers with powdered sugar icing and coconut on top for dessert. Jenny loved these and they were easy to make. Aunt Harriet appreciated Jenny’s creative side too.

When Aunt Harriet found that the society ladies in town collected antique glass, she checked out books on the subject and became an expert in antique glass. She decided Uncle Wilmer should run for state representative on the Democratic ticket two years after FDR’s landslide victory. He was defeated by a local doctor as Kansas was traditionally Republican, but she met a lot of people while Wilmer was campaigning and his name was up before the public. Aunt Harriet joined the Legion Auxiliary and became a well respected member of this group. She supervised art projects at the school her girls attended and helped their school win prizes with their outstanding posters. She joined many other organizations as well. Since Uncle Wilmer was a wounded veteran, he was elected commander of the American Legion and was also an important member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He too, began to think himself superior to his brother Warren.

Harriet’s need to feel superior spread to Elizabeth, and Margaret became tired of her pretentious prima donna ways and the friendship cooled. Jenny and Susan’s friendship remained strong until Susan fell under the sway of adolescent peer pressure when they were nearly thirteen years old, and then she abandoned Jenny for another friend in a most hurtful way two days after they had sworn to become bosom friends.

Mother would see Harriet at family reunions and organizations and they would be pleasant and congenial toward each other, but the subtle put downs were always present and Mother could not help resenting this.

Daddy always supported and helped his older brother and never said a word against him, although Wilmer often took advantage of his kindly nature.

Years later, after daughter Elizabeth graduated with a degree in art from a prestigious university, she scorned her mother’s somewhat stilted kind of art. By now Harriet had become greatly humbled, secretly disappointed in her daughter, though never saying as much, but wiser, and she decided to resume the pursuit of art in her own way. She took up oil painting and tempera painting and produced some creditable work which Jenny admired. When Jenny said she would like to buy one of the paintings, Aunt Harriet said she wouldn’t think of charging Jenny for her art, and she gave her a lovely oil painting of a cool mountain lake. Jenny told Aunt Harriet she would cherish it always and Aunt Harriet was moved to tears. Like Daddy, Jenny was forgiving and thought she understood Aunt Harriet’s attempts to be a false “somebody,” though in hindsight it was all so sad and unnecessary. Are any of us so fortunate or so wise that we make the best possible choices as to which direction to take? Perhaps it is enough that we are able to recognize our past mistakes so that we can go on living with ourselves and rise above our errors to new heights.