Visiting the Parents & Grandparents

While back in Oklahoma last weekend I stopped to visit my parents and grandparents. All are deceased so I’m talking about visiting their graves. The first to go was my paternal Grandfather. He died in 1966, the year before I was born. Born in 1886, he was 80 years old.

The next to go was my maternal Grandmother, Sara (Thiessen) Klaassen. She passed in 1982, also at the age of 80. I was just 15 at the time, it was my first funeral. I remember the long drive to the cemetery — just under 20 miles. My Grandparents lived for decades in Clinton OK but the cemetery for their Mennonite church was a few miles outside the small town of Corn OK where my mom was born & raised. One of my most vivid memories was the abandoned old church next to the cemetery. The church had moved to a new building in 1974.

My maternal Grandfather lived another 15 years, long enough to visit me a couple of times in St Louis. Born in the country in 1899 he was amazed at all our old buildings — many older than him. I wasn’t able to attend his services but I now know that same church was there next to the cemetery.

By 2006 the church, abandoned for 32 years, was in sad shape. Out in rural areas you don’t hire demolition crews to take down a wooden structure, you have a big fire.

I expected to see the church still there last Sunday, I was saddened to learn of its fate. The building was built in 1901 — just after my Grandparents were born and six years before Oklahoma would become a state.

By chance my brother works with a guy from the area who knew my Grandfather and was there in June 2006 when they burned the old church. Turns out my brother and I have known his uncle since the late 1960s, a cabinet maker that worked on many of the same houses as our father.

Getting directions to the cemetery was interesting. It doesn’t have a street address, instead you use the longitude & latitude coordinates. Roads in dirt and gravel are on the section lines.

I have to wonder why the church was located a good four miles from the small town. Perhaps at the time it was thought the town might grow to be much larger? In a town almost exclusively of Russian/German Mennonites this was not the only Mennonite Church. The town of Corn today is small just as it was in 1931 when my mom was born there. The 2000 Census counted just 591 people. The main road through town has no stop sign, much less a traffic signal.

While I can’t imagine living in such a town today it is nice to visit a place with no Wal-Mart, no supermarket, no fast food drive-thru restaurants. My Grandparents on my mom’s & father’s sides were from the generation that raised much of their own food. They didn’t stock up in the frozen section of the store, they canned their food for consumption in the off season. Even in his 90s my maternal Grandfather was raising far more food than he could eat.

At the start of the 20th century in St Louis you also had immigrants raising their own food in backyard gardens. This tradition was not rural or urban, it was the lack of alternatives. Of course in the city you had local bakers and butchers on nearly every neighborhood corner. My Grandmothers didn’t have nearby bakeries so they knew how to bake bread and lots of it. On the weekend my Mom’s Mom would make Zwieback — a sweetened roll. I’ve made a couple of batches back in college that took too long and were not perfect like my Grandma’s were.

In our era of agribusiness we’ve lost so much — namely the ability to sustain ourselves individually and as a community. My grandparent’s generation lived longer lives than their kids largely, I think, because their diet wasn’t composed of overly processed and packaged food. Their diet was mostly organic produce & meats. They didn’t call it organic, it just was.

I love much of the advancements of the 20th century but I think it is important to step back and evaluate our lives today to see if everything is an improvement over past generations. Be it growing our own food, hanging clothes to dry in the sun or walking to our destination I think we can still learn a lot from earlier generations even though they may no longer be here to teach us.