By Suzanna Leigh
We called her Gramma Stoltz. She lived in a one-bedroom trailer across the road from her son’s auto wrecking yard and the big house on Cemetery Road where she had raised her children. Here, she tended her quarter-acre garden and a passel of chickens.
She was eighty when I worked for her, and used a wheelchair – but not in the usual way.
Lydia Stoltz would be sitting in her wheelchair when I arrived. If it was still a little chilly out, she had on several skirts for warmth and an old sweater with holes. There would be a pot of oats cooking on the stove, for her chickens. If one of her hens had escaped the pen and met its demise on the road, she added her to the pot as well. That’s when I lost all respect for chickens, the cannibals!
Under Gramma’s direction, I lifted the pot off the stove and set it on the seat of the wheelchair as she stood behind it. I grabbed a bag of chicken feed from under the couch and put that beside the pot, along with the seed we would be planting that day. Her hoe stood beside the door, and that we laid across the arm rests. Then, Gramma Stoltz pushed the wheelchair out the door, past the apple tree that grew from an apple core she planted years ago, and down the walk to the chicken coop.
After feeding the chickens, we headed for the garden, freshly tilled by her neighbor, Mr. Mann. As I poked holes in the soft earth with my finger, Gramma dropped a corn kernel in each hole and covered it over with her hoe – which served both as a crutch and a gardening tool.
After a couple of hours work, we headed inside for a lunch of canned peaches, cottage cheese, and salad. As we ate, she told me of her life.
Lydia Stoltz came to America from Germany in the early 1900s, as a child. I think she was raised on the old Zarth farm, on 115th Avenue near the Catholic Church. She showed me a photo of a strawberry field in front of that house, where she and friends would have strawberry fights while picking berries. After she married, she and her husband raised vegetables and took them by boat to the Pike Place Market to sell. It was there she broke her back and that was why she had the wheelchair – or so I assumed.
She told me with pride how she planted gooseberries against her husband’s wishes. “He liked his beer and never went to the far end of the garden, so I planted them there,” she told me. “They sold quite well!” Apparently, if they were illegal then (because they hosted white pine blister rust), no one told her.
One day, we went in Lady Bug, my little black Karmen Ghia, to have lunch with Gramma Stoltz’s friend, Granny Morgan.
Granny Morgan – I think her name was Ida May – had pygmy goats along with her milking goats. When I went to wash my hands in the bathroom, Granny cautioned me to be careful of the baby pygmy goat she was raising there. We lunched on chicken noodle soup, with her wide flat homemade noodles. In short, she was living a life I aspired to. Like many in my generation, I wanted to live closer to the land, have goats, and do everything by from scratch – perhaps what today we are calling “slow living.” We called it “going back to the land.”
Granny Morgan Milking Lollipop
I learned some things about gardening from Gramma Stoltz, but I never caught the gardening bug. Now I am nearing 80, and wonder if I have learned the lessons she and Granny Morgan taught me. Remembering Gramma Stoltz’s wheelchair/wheelbarrow, and the baby goat in Granny Morgan’s bathroom, I think I learned to use what I have in unusual ways, whatever does the job.
I’m not sure I learned Gramma Stoltz’s perseverance though, as she continued to work in her garden even with a broken back.
