The little green basket

I regard myself as fortunate to come from a family of storytellers. We have conversations when we get together with plenty of laughter, but we routinely tell stories, lots of stories. Not just about what is going on now, but stories of recollection: stories of our younger selves, stories our parents told us; stories from our grandparents and even great grandparents.

Here is one which I have known from my childhood. I am doing early spring cleaning, to get everything organized for the New Year. In clearing out boxes of records and archives, I came across this letter from my grandmother, Mommy Nell from April 1973. It is a story which I know from the first time she related it to me, but here it is in her own words. All the people named are her siblings.

4-73

Dearest Chuck,

I want you to have the little green basket. I've told you about it but you have probably forgotten. It was Christmas 1913. Our father had died in Feb before. Mother was not well and Maggie was just past 2 yrs. I don't know where Clarence was but maybe away working. Wink was 13 and he told Velta & me if we would split some wood he would go to Howard Ridge a little country store and get what Santa Claus had for us.

Our house was built on a slope and one side was high enough off the ground we could stand up and it was not underpinned. We kept our wood under there to keep it dry. Well, split wood we did, although I am sure they were not very big sticks. Soon Wink came back with two baskets just alike wrapped in newspaper.

We thought they were pretty and I don't remember feeling neglected by Santa. I'm sure they didn't cost more than a nickel or dime apiece but I've often wondered where he got the nickel or dime. A few years back I told him about it but he didn't remember where he got the money.

My grandmother would have been eight years old when her father died. Her mother was so ill she could not fend for them and the family was split up. Her older brother Clarence was fifteen and Wink was thirteen and they were set to work in a farming community accustomed to hard work at an early age. My grandmother eight and her sister Velta I think perhaps ten, and then Maggie, the two year old. Maggie was adopted and Nell and Velta worked as mother's helpers for a number of years, moving from family to family, essentially orphans. They both managed to work there way through teacher's college and became teachers.

The first time I heard the story of the little green basket, I likely was not much older than five or six. It sat on a display shelf in the kitchen and I asked my grandmother about it one morning as she was preparing breakfast. What I took away from the story at that telling, was family looks out for one another. Wink was 13 without two pennies to rub together but he made sure, after a terrible year of loss, that his two younger sisters had something for Christmas.

It touches me yet and I still take inspiration from that long ago set of tragedies and hardships in the backwoods of the Ozarks. Tough times but they were tough, hard, good people.