Grandmom Hugar: A Renaissance Woman

"I see Grandmom's house!" One of us kids would scream loudly from the 1954 Cadillac sedan driven by my Dad, a Pennsylvania State Trooper, with Mom and six kids in tow. The youngest, Pam, was sitting on the arm rest dividing the back seat. Lisa and Mary Kay were seated on one side of her and Barb was on the other side. Chris and I sat up front between Mom and Dad, at least some of the time. Dad would be puffing on a Pall Mall cigarette with his side window cracked open. Mom was pregnant with her 7th child. My sister Lisa would always have her nose buried in the crack of the back seat and get car sick. (It was a regular occurrence, so you can understand why I made a point to sit up front.) Us older kids would be sitting at the edge of our seats, trying to see Grandmom's house first. The first one to see it would win. Win What? Nothing. Just that contest for that period of time. The sentence was always sung, however. "I see Grand" was sung on G and "Mom's House" was sung on lower C. We always made up songs about any and everything. The songs would just arise spontaneously. If we all liked it, we kept singing it. If we didn't all like it, we would keep quiet. I think Mom and Dad preferred the silence but they were too kind to tell us to shut up. Chris, nine times out of ten, would sing it out first, as he did on this particular trip. We could see the house about five miles away, as it stood on a hill, overlooking a valley, all land owned by Grandmom. As we followed the country road into Keewadin, we would talk excitedly about Grandmom. (Grandpop had died a few years earlier and none of us kids knew him much at all. We just knew that he died of a heart attack at a Grange Hall meeting.)

Grandmom Hugar, however, we grew to know very well and utterly cherished her. She would always be waiting for us with a huge smile and big bear hugs, as she called them.(We figured she knew what bear hugs were all about. On the sunporch was a huge black bear rug Grandpop had made many years ago, from the 10 foot black bear he had shot.) She would often be taking a cherry cobbler out of the oven as we were walking into her house. If it was cold, she would ask Chris or me to go throw some coal into the coal furnace in the basement. We would sit at her table and eat cherry cobbler and biscuits and honey and homemade lemonade. I recall her house to be one of the most warm and welcoming places of my entire life. All because of Grandmom being Grandmom. To this day, one of the greatest compliments we grown children can get (girls!) is "You're just like Grandmom Hugar!" (Usually this is said if we are so determined to do something, we do it, come hell or high water!)

Her name was Jeannette. She always thought herself to be a large homely woman. She would say that many times to me, and I would say,"So what's the matter with being homely? Doesn't that mean you like to stay at home and make pies and cook and make jelly?" She would laugh and say, "I never thought of it that way." I also told her it was good she was tall and strong because my Dad was a policeman, and HE needed to be big and strong. I told her Grandpop looked like a runt next to her in pictures of them together. She got quite a kick out of that too. She told me that my initials and birthday were the same as Grandpop's. JCH, and October 6. So, you were named after him, in a way she said. Grandmom WAS a big woman, six feet tall with gentle brown eyes and a ready, beautiful smile. When she said how ugly she was to us kids, this would always sadden us, and we told her to never ever say that again because she was as beautiful as a fairy godmother to us. When we look at her pictures now, we see a very humble, plain looking woman with well worn hands and a smile that brought instant joy and peace to everyone she encountered. A Renaissance Woman, majestic in every way.

She was a voracious reader and a perpetual learner. She taught herself to drive after Grandpop died, and was frustrated about parking her Packard in the garage. She was so determined she somehow managed to get the Packard in sideways!(much to the chagrin of her grown sons who had to right the wrong, without tearing down the garage.) She was a very determined woman who, once she set her mind to do something, did it well, or not at all. (Except parking and driving the car, as these inabilities plagued her the rest of her life, as she would drive a mile down the country road to visit the grave of Grandpop.) Grandmom made her own rugs and had a rug weaving machine upstairs. She would use old rags to make rugs. She canned all her fruits and vegetables, made her own bread, and even had her own apiary. Her honey was the best. To this day, one of my fondest memories are of her homemade biscuits with butter and honey fresh from the comb. She also oil painted and made dough sculptures of her beloved parakeets. She always had a bird around the house, and she would let it out of its cage to amuse us kids. We all shrieked with delight as the bird would dive bomb us. Grandmom had a real connection with her grandchildren. She saw kids as kids, and gave us the freedom to be spontaneous and cut loose. She would connect with us in such a way that we knew she was really a kid at heart herself.

But Grandmom had a very serious side. She would often sit in her rocker and read from her Bible. She was not Catholic. She was a Lutheran. Year ago, she and her whole family were Catholic. But when the depression came and they had no money, they could not pay their "pew rent" and were asked to leave the church. They immediately joined the Lutheran church down the road. One day as she was reading from her Bible, she showed me her Sunday School lessons, and I read them avidly, lying on her bearskin rug, as the sun streamed in through the windows. When I got a little tired, I would rest my head on the bear's head. After all, he was dead, and actually the rug was quite warm and snuggly. I loved to read those Sunday School lessons. My Mom would tell me in private not to read them, as it was Protestant reading material. Of course, then, it became all the more fascinating to me. Nothing like being told to refrain from something, as it more often then not, becomes all the more beguiling. I could see nothing wrong at all with the lessons and utterly loved reading them. Grandmom told me she would save them for me but she did not want to upset my Mom.

Grandmom also had a huge library. She had a ton of medical books and I would sit behind her reading chair and read the medical books from cover to cover. She also had leather bound books of all the classics. She told me that books were her best friends, tried and true, and were always a pleasure to be around. Grandmom saw how much I loved to read, particularly the medical books, so she told me I could take them home with me. She said I was smart enough to be a doctor some day, so start studying now while I was a kid. Unfortunately, I often imagined I had every disease I read about and would develop symptoms of "non tropical sprue" or think I may have gotten venereal disease from a toilet at a gas station.