The Board Room

(PLEASE NOTE: I have not been able to upload photos onto my Blog Posts so I have not blogged in a while. But I finally decided to go for it without photos until the time I figure out the problem. If you would like to see the photo that I intended to add with this post, both are on my Facebook page: The Reindeer Keeper). The Post Begins Here: When my older brother was a toddler, he nicknamed our grandmother Giddy. That nickname stayed with her over the years. Giddy worked from the minute she got up to the minute she went to bed. When going downstairs in the morning, she would be wearing one of her house dresses. Functional, with pockets, wearing such a loose-fitting dress made it easier for her to move about the old farmhouse as she cooked, mended, sewed, knitted, crocheted, braided rugs, did the wash, hung it out on the line to dry, did the ironing, baked bread, made donuts and cookies and tarts, prepared meals, cleaned-up, tended to six daughters, helped her husband in the barn and the fields and the gardens while dealing with everything else through four seasons, seven days a week. That rambling old farmhouse with its screened-in veranda was Giddy’s office. The kitchen was her Board Room, with wainscoting and white enamel cabinets adding a decorative touch. A woodstove in that rather large Board Room was where Giddy did her cooking and baking. Board members gathered daily to enjoy her home-cooked meals and partake in conversations while sitting around a pine table with three leaves. Instead of stocks and bonds and trends in the marketplace, discussions in the Board Room focused on chores and family matters and more chores. The work was hard. The hours were long in my grandmother's office. She never closed for holidays. Not even on Sundays. Not even on long weekends. She did not benefit from paid vacations or any vacations or sick leave or health insurance or social security or 401ks. And even though she never wore pants, everyone knew she wore the pants in that office while wearing a functional house dress with pockets. Giddy’s kindness and wit along with her molasses cookies baked in her woodstove, so big that it took two hands to hold one; her pies; her French goulash; her traditional Christmas bread; her braiding rugs when sitting in her rocking chair; her high cheek bones and French-Canadian heritage, along with those six daughters and the love of her life were all part of this woman who did not need a movement to define her nor technology to assist her. Giddy never would have bothered with facelifts or Botox or implants or manicured fingernails. Her brown spots and wrinkles and long, gray hair kept up in a bun defined her, especially when conducting business in her Board Room in a house dress with all members in place around the pine table with three leaves, before going out to the barn to do their chores.