Ammi Midstokke: The inheritance of wisdom
Sometime around 1984, my grandmother Beverly had her first heart attack. And as things went with Granny, she never did anything halfway. A team of surgeons rearranged her plumbing, leaving her legs scarred and brain scared of egg yolks.
They told her that her life had been too stressful. Vice President at Tandem computers, single mother of five children, losing one to fate and another to leukemia at 18, touting cowboy boots and polyester pant suits, she balked at them, then built a house on the Deschutes River in Central Oregon, and “retired.”
This began a sort of renaissance for her in which I developed a fear of bran muffins, low-fat cottage cheese, and anything with the word “loaf” attached to it. She and her retired school teacher bestie, Marge, lived like queens of baking and golf while sitting on the board of the local homeowners’ association.
Never women to intentionally slow down, they took up a string of new outdoor hobbies. They had one of those Nordic-Track machines in their living room (when they still came with wooden skis!), brand new chrome painted Mongoose mountain bikes with fluffy seat covers, and giant rafts for the river.
They bought wood splitting machines and chainsaws and pickup trucks. They made us stack wood every summer then floated us down the river and fed us corn on the cob at night. Granny would rally down the highways listening to some nun singing bird songs on her radio while cursing “Oh George!” at anyone brave enough to pull out in front of her.
They were the envy of all non-retired people and perhaps even most of the retired neighborhood. Even then, I wanted to work hard in a corporate job, pay my dues, and one day have my own shiny Mongoose and satellite dish TV stations.
In 1990, Marge’s brother, a snowshoe maker from Wisconsin, hand-crafted the ladies their own sets of traditional snowshoes. He signed them “from Gordon” and wrote their name on them. He attached a pair of Bob Maki bindings to one set and a traditional leather buckling binding to another.
For reasons I do not know, the snowshoes were stored away, the bindings in their original packaging, and left until Granny had sent her last coffee can full of stale Christmas cookies and left our family to fend for themselves. Life has not been the same since and Avon perfume still makes me nostalgic for her.
Last December my dad (her youngest son) came to lay eyes on my crazy new off-grid adventure in the mountains. He brought me two pair of traditional snowshoes. “For commuting,” he said.
One said “Marge, 1990” and the other “Bev, 1990.”
It seemed almost contradictory to strap these works of art to my feet, but I did. On a sunny Sunday afternoon, in the adventurous spirit of my grandmother, I set my sights on the mountains and snowshoed out my back door.
My grandmother was generous in ways I would not understand until years after she passed. She and Marge taught me not only the lessons of hard work, integrity, and humility, but the joys of living life as fully as I possibly can. Every single day. Until my last batch of cookies has been packed into a Folger’s can.
Between now and then, I plan on doing a lot of snowshoeing.