Growing up in northwest Ohio, our family home was built on a corner of my Grandma Gabel’s farm.  Most years our yard was surrounded by cornfields, but some years they planted soybeans, and occasionally wheat.   Us grandkids would walk through the field to her home and explore her barnyard where she kept a pen full of pigs.    We loved to play in the abandoned milk-house and imagined it as our little private clubroom.   Her home was a large white square farmhouse with a substantial porch stretching across the front.  In the spring we would help her clean it off and put out the chintz cushions onto the porch swing and wicker chairs.

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I have early memories of quietly viewing the photos and art she had in her front living room – the “good” room where the pretty things were kept and you didn’t romp or rough-house.  One of the pieces of art was a pen and ink drawing she did herself in the ninth grade.  I admired it and commented on it so frequently, that when I was in college she gave it to me.  She said I was the only one who ever noticed it.   

One silver-framed photo was of my long-dead grandfather holding my long-dead 4 year-old uncle on his knee. I never knew either of them, but Gramma spoke of them with reverence.  The little boy Joe was my mother’s only brother who died of a ruptured appendix before he turned 5.   A few years later my grandfather Lewis Gabel died of bladder cancer, leaving my 30 year old grandmother to run a 100 acre farm and raise 3 little girls by herself.  

My  mother was 7 years old at the time, and was expected to become a second mother to her 5 and 3 year old sisters.  She also was appointed to assist the 18 yr. old boy who became the “hired hand” to work the farm.    From what I can gather, my grandmother was devastated and traumatized and of course never received counseling and my mother was called in to fill the gap when Grandma broke down.     Her depression left a lasting mark on my mother, who also was devastated and traumatized and never received counseling regarding her own loss of her Daddy.         I visualize this event as a crooked spike that was driven through the heart of this  family, then left to rust and fester.  The old barbed wire represents how these events bound this family in a state of dysfunction, where one’s only task was to work the farm and survive.   Life was tiring.   Wounds scarred over but never healed.    Hearts were torn and worn.