MOM-MOM'S "OLD-FASHIONED GIRL"

“Many of our mutual interests dissolved our 70-year age gap, but our shared love of Louisa May Alcott’s stories cemented us as cherished friends.”

Until I was ten, we moved every few years because my father was in the military. Though we had a large extended family, the only person who visited us everywhere was my great-grandmother Clara, Mom-Mom Hall—never mind that our other relatives were considerably younger and lived no farther away than she did. For my fourth birthday, when she was 74, Mom-Mom baked me a cake, decorated it to look like my favorite character, Alf, got in her car, balanced the cake on her lap and drove five hours from her home in Dover, Delaware, to deliver it to me in Connecticut.

The summer before fifth grade, we settled in Dover too, right next door to Mom-Mom. My parents chronically fought, and to escape the stress at my house, I’d slip out every day and go to hers. As soon as I crossed her threshold, she’d put on her pearl-colored cardigan and wordlessly turn on the A/C, even though she preferred the heat and was thrifty in the way of people who grew up in the Depression. (For as long as I knew her, she wore the same impeccably kept blue winter coat. And after a lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, she’d scrape the flecks of strawberry jam off her plate and put them back in the jar.)

I loved being with her and would follow her around with a spiral notebook, pretending to be a journalist so she’d tell me stories about her life growing up. One of my favorites: When she was a teenager, she and her brother went to get a Christmas tree but forgot to bring rope to lash it to the car’s roof, so Mom-Mom sat on top of the car holding onto the tree while her brother slowly drove them home.

When I wasn’t asking her questions, I was exploring her house. She’d sit on the couch knitting while I opened doors and drawers and poked around on shelves. I found an antique fireplace bellows, brown-speckled water jugs, expertly hand-embroidered pillows. And one day, inside a cabinet, behind a stack of my late great-grandfather’s history and birdwatching books, I found a fancy old set of novels by Louisa May Alcott. Inside each, her mother had written “Clara” in a beautiful slanting hand, and I understood why the books were still precious to her.

Mom-Mom was delighted when I asked to borrow the novels, some of which I’d never heard of. By that point, I’d already read my own copy of Little Women into disrepair. Mom-Mom loved Little Women too, so much so that in an uncharacteristic splurge a few months after my discovery, she sent away for a set of porcelain dolls representing the March sisters and Marmee. When they arrived, she called me over so we could admire them together. Many of our mutual interests—sewing, cooking, gardening—dissolved our 70-year age gap, but our shared love of Alcott’s stories cemented us as cherished friends. 

That year, I read every one of the novels and was particularly moved by Old-Fashioned Girl. In the first half of the book, the heroine, plucky Polly, visits her wealthy cousins who live in the city. Polly is observant and wise, while most of her extended family is entitled and thoughtless. In my favorite part, she watches her aunt reject the hug of her own daughter, whose dress and face are dirty, then considers how her mother always embraced her children no matter how messy they were.

That passage reinforced what, thanks to Mom-Mom, I already knew about unconditional love. When she grew frail and the rest of our family pulled away, I’d go over twice a week to sit beside her. On one of these visits, I insisted she had to live to 100, and she calmly said she didn’t want to live that long. She never feared death. As a child she’d enjoyed tea parties with her siblings in a nearby cemetery; in her 80s, she and her sister went out one day to choose their caskets and funeral arrangements, and afterwards treated themselves to a fancy lunch. She died at 92, on Valentine’s Day, taking so much of my heart with her.

—Emily Hall

Mom-Mom and I during one of her many trips to see us in Connecticut. I don’t know what happened to the fabulous throw she crocheted, but when I was in college she made me a similar one I still have.

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And a little bonus Mom-Mom, from Emily Hall…

In the 1950s she saw that Sears was selling house plans, and found one she loved. (My great-grandfather worked for Sears, and they were very loyal to the brand.) She decided it was her dream house, so they bought a plot of land and built that model. It was her home until she died. ••• After my dad—her first grandchild—was born, she fully carpeted her kitchen, she was so worried he’d fall and hurt his head on the hardwood floor. She didn’t remove the carpeting until I was safely in college, almost 45 years later. ••• Into her 80s, at Christmas time, she and her sister Mary made floral arrangements for any graves left bare at Barrett’s Chapel, the church she’d attended as a child. ••• She had a guy for anything and everything: a guy who could reupholster decades-old furniture like new; a guy who could custom design a mattress so it wasn’t too high for her; a guy who would come and fix her car in her driveway. They were old friends of her and my great-grandfather’s, and some of them lived as far as Philadelphia, about a two-hour drive, but they admired her so greatly that they’d come to help the moment she asked. However, if you came to her house trying to get her to vote for a Republican, she’d staunchly tell you she was a lifelong Democrat and close the door in your face. Same if you tried to interest her in another religion; she was a Methodist and proud of it.

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Emily Hall’s creative nonfiction has appeared in TapRoot, The AutoEthnographer and The CEA Critic. She has a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and lives in North Carolina with her husband and their pets.

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