My GreatGrandmother’s RockingChair

My Great-Grandmother’s Rocking Chair

I have a lovely, old, wooden, rocking chair sitting in the living room. It’s stained a honey golden patina and the aged carved wood is a mix of pine, maple, and willow. It no longer has its original rockers because a careless mover crushed them and they had to be replaced. But the history of the rocking chair remains in tact and its presence in my life is my link to the generations that came before and formed me, though they never even knew I’d exist.

My great-grandfather immigrated to Canada from Scotland to take over the farm of an elderly, childless uncle who had arrived much earlier to accept Mad King Charlie’s generous land grants of the day. My great-grandmother, well blossomed in her first pregnancy, endured the long hard sea voyage, and the portage up the Saint John River, to what was then still a primitive sod farm house. I can only imagine what she must have felt - facing her first birth with no female relatives or friends to help, a young bride in a strange and austere land, a girl bred in the urban gaiety of Edinborough, now tossed into the rural plainness of a land that the civilized world kept forgetting. What must she have thought as their horses rounded the deep bend in Rusagonis’ only, and still, main road to see a homestead made from the peat and mud bricks hewn by a old, stubborn seaman-cum-farmer who had never considered the feminine comfort his nephew’s wife might have anticipated?

I heard stories that she was a feisty woman and my grandmother, who married the youngest of Isabelle’s brood of eight, swears I am filled with the spirit and fire that shot out of her clear blue eyes and fueled her long red tresses. She didn’t accept the relative anonymity of a farmer’s wife quietly. She was disinclined to be a passive shadow that haunted the kitchen but had little or no voice. In a strict, almost puritanical era of hotly defended Victorian values, she deigned to do the unthinkable. She taught her two daughters “the facts of life”! She actually talked about it, using the right terms and with a boldness that defied anyone to challenge her that this wasn’t ladylike or Christian.

Her own sister, not having been told that certain hormonal developments would transform her body on a monthly basis, died needlessly of hypothermic exposure when she, thinking she was bleeding to death, tried to stem the flow in the icy winter waters of nearby river. That singular injustice molded my great-grandmother and she swore that no girl-child in her family would ever be so misinformed again. She was not bawdy or disrespectful, just pragmatic and straightforward. In matters of human anatomy and function, she believed that gender should not be a barrier to knowledge. Her rebellious belief system etched a feminist streak in our family that, though never openly named as such, has framed the definition of womanhood for each successive generation.

My great-grandmother became a mid-wife, for she appeared to be the only woman for 50 miles who didn’t blush and swoon at the sight or mention of things “private and unspeakable.” She brought all her own children and all her grandchildren into the world, and all the mothers safely through the ordeal. She marched as a suffragette at the turn of the century, and marched her daughters in tow. She was bold and formidable, but tender and gracious. In her legend, that I’ve heard so many times before, she is fearless, a force standing broad and strong next to the equally imposing, but gentle, figure of my 6’6’ great-grandfather. In the mind’s eye of a little girl, I imagined my great-grandmother to be a benevolent giantess, a character who sheer energy engulfed her world.

My great-grandfather bought her a single civilized comfort to celebrate their new home - a hand-carved wooden rocking chair to lull the tears of a new born babe that would sooner not have entered the cold air of a New Brunswick winter. And through that first winter, as the young couple struggled to pull a thriving farm out the mud and rock of virgin soil, she would sit by the firelight in the evening and rock her new born daughter, a slow but utter resolve growing deep in heart that her child would be stronger than the bitter cold that tried to defeat her parents. They struggled and sacrificed and eventually their investment rewarded them with a thriving livelihood, a large healthy family, and a solid homestead that land-marked the fledgling community they had adopted. Yet despite the upturn in their economic circumstance, and many other fine pieces of furniture now dressing up their nest, she kept that old rocking chair in a place of honour, centered in the large farm kitchen, near enough to the wood stove for its occupant to feel warm and drowsy after a big satisfying meal.

She eventually passed on and the farmhouse was gradually modernized. Overtime, my grandmother exchanged the wood stove for electric, and eventually a microwave stood in its former place. Three more generations of grandchildren have crowded into that kitchen to fetch a quick snack of molasses cookies and tea. Several have even been married in the house. Several elderly relatives have been waked there. But still that rocking chair stayed put, jealously clinging to the three squared feet of floor space it had expropriated as its own. I remembered sitting in it with my teddy bear and a big thick afghan, listening to Grampie spin stories about various family characters, and falling to sleep with my nose pressed into the lathed spokes of the seat back. I always new who’s chair it was as surely as if my great-grandmother might suddenly appear and expect to sit in it. And I always felt a special connection to it, for it stands as a silent, unlikely monument for all my own rebellion.

When I was 16, that rocking chair arrived at our front door by special delivery. My mother, with a knowing grin, sent me to retrieve it from the back of the delivery truck. Tied to its arm was a note that simply said: “it is yours because you understand it best.” The chair went immediately to my bedroom and it has gone everywhere with me since. My grandmother saw in me something that only my great-grandmother might have seen too, something that gave that rocking chair a safe home and a second chapter in its life. I still don’t understand what that something is, but as I sit in that rocking chair even now, I still hear the faint echo of a baby crying and a woman’s soothing lullabies to quell it. Perhaps my great-grandmother is rocking us still.