THE FOLDER
“14 pages of mnemonics and rhymes my grandmother titled 'Memory Nuggets for Elisabeth Rose Webber.'"
It’s one of those old-fashioned folders with metal prongs to hold hole-punched paper. Inside are 14 pages of mnemonics and rhymes my grandmother titled “Memory Nuggets for Elisabeth Rose Webber” and sent me for my tenth birthday. The font from her manual typewriter, some of its keys subtly out of alignment, evokes her as clearly as her handwriting. She was 66 when she typed up the 14 pages. I was her first granddaughter, and my family was living in Japan just as she had 35 years earlier, her daughter married to a missionary priest just as she had been.
The nuggets include things I was too old for even then: “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe,” “Thirty Days Hath September,” “I before E,” the alphabet song. But I pored over her hand-drawn zodiac, in the center of which she’d typed up the mnemonic verse that begins “The ram, the bull, the heavenly twins….” I never knew quite what to make of Samuel Coleridge’s poem about iambs, trochees, dactyls and the other Latin meters.
A few years after she sent me the folder, I started boarding school in my grandparents’ town. I spent almost every Sunday at their house; I was shy, and it was a haven. I could eat her Sunday roast chicken, do my laundry and then rest in the living room on the uncomfortable green couch, ostensibly doing homework while she and my grandfather napped—he in his book-lined study, she in her bedroom that was dominated by two, maybe three, large desks.
Those desks! Who has multiple desks in one room? Her daughters teased that she had to keep getting new ones as she filled them up—but I don’t think it was a joke. She wrote constantly: letters, prayers, a novel, the beginnings of two advice books. The novel, which she never published, is based loosely on her life in Tokyo before the war; the advice books were meant to help young clergy wives who, like her, had never run a household but suddenly needed to entertain regularly. It was already a bygone life by the time I was spending Sundays with her.
After naptime we might walk down to her herb garden, fragrant with lavender and thyme, where she would point out what needed weeding or pruning or watering as we meandered the narrow paths. Later we’d sit at the kitchen table for weak milky tea with store-bought cookies she kept in a tin. I well remember the feeling of warmth I got from being with her, and the knowledge that I was loved, but I don’t recall our conversations. I don’t suppose we talked about the things she cared about: her friends, her blood pressure, her spiritual life, her writing.
That writing—like her master’s in sociology and brief career in social work—was unknown to me until 30 years after she died, when, after my mother’s death, the archive of her work came to my sister and me. As far as I’d known, she was just my grandmother. I think grandparents are often opaque to their grandchildren that way.
I recently learned that Coleridge wrote his Latin-meters poem for his son—a talisman of love cloaked in the language of instruction. That's just how I see my grandmother's gift as well. I rarely open the folder now, but I do come in contact with it almost every day. Its slightly pebbled texture makes for a good mousepad, a thing my grandmother never used. I doubt she ever even used an electric typewriter, though I imagine she would have welcomed a computer, finding in it both space for and access to a whole world of things worth remembering.
—Libby Gruner
Libby Gruner, a professor of English at the University of Richmond, has published essays on food, family and mothering in a variety of anthologies, and articles about children’s and young adult literature in academic journals. She’s working on a larger project about her grandmother’s life and legacy.
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Your grandma sounds like my kind of gal! I’m impressed by her desks! My grandma did not write, but her sister did. A reclusive spinster who never left my great-grandmother’s house, she wrote songs & poems. I had them copied and bound into inexpensive notebooks that I gave to the women of our family one Christmas.
It made me happy to hear that even though it was thirty years after her death, you learned so much more about your grandmother and her life from things she’d left behind. I call them ‘breadcrumbs’ and they are treasures!