This morning I had coffee with a friend, which is unusual. Normally I spend my mornings in the company of dead historical figures, so yes, it was a nice change of pace.
I came home to do a bit of cleaning and then went downtown to visit Mae, my 95-year-old friend. I told her about my miscarriage and she shared the fact that she’d had six pregnancies and only one live child out of the whole deal. Six pregnancies, in five years, I might add. Four ended in miscarriages (around the 3-4 month mark) and then her daughter was born after a 48 hour labor, only to die within an hour. The ordeal of labor, hard as it was on the mother, was fatally hard on the infant. Fourteen months later she gave birth to her son. She said she could scarcely believe they were letting her leave the hospital with a live baby in her arms.
Mae then told the story of living in a nice little bungalow in Chicago, when her son was about ten. She had a good-paying job at an aircraft factory and she had all the modern conveniences—electricity, plumbing, hot water, and a washer and dryer. She’d just finished decorating the entire place, “the glaze on the porch was barely dry”, when her husband came back from a trip to Minnesota and told her he was putting the bungalow up for sale. He’d bought a farm in Minnesota and they were moving.
She fumes about his mandate to this day. He didn’t consult her. Just up and moved her to an old farmhouse without electricity or plumbing. He didn’t really have the money to buy any farm implements and her her job at the Red Wing Pottery Factory earning 35 cents an hour certainly didn’t cover all their expenses. There were no more pregnancies after that, if that’s any indication about how mad she was.
Mae lasted five years, and then she left him. Oh, he eventually got her back, but life was never a picnic, even after they moved off the farm. I think she’d laugh herself to death if she saw a website on vintage homemaking like the one I mentioned yesterday. Although, had she married another man, had she been able to keep her bungalow in Chicago, and her well-paying job, she might have brought the spirit of play to her housekeeping as well. When the spirit of survival and resentment entered in, play went out the window.
4:07:49 PM 
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