More About Connie

After years of neglect, the apple tree over in the pasture needed pruning, and we were going to tackle it. This was about twenty years ago, when I was in my late twenties, and Connie (she never let us call her granny or grandmother) was almost 80. We geared up with saws and loppers and gloves and stomped over the rocky, boggy pasture to the tree. It was huge and a complete mess – it took half an hour just to clear a way to the trunk.

Finally I climbed into the tree to limb some of the higher branches. Looking down I saw Connie, a small woman, further shrunk by age, fly-away hair coming out from her battered straw hat, swatting at the gnats, and hauling away large limbs with her arthritic hands. She wore a grim look of determination on her face -- Connie the indomitable.

After an hour or so of hot, sweaty, prickly toil, we returned to the terrace to admire the results. I was exhausted. Pretty good for a morning's work, she said, but Ralph would have to get some more of the limbs shooting up at the top. In the following years, Connie would swoon over how beautiful that tree was, how well pruned. She would refer to it as "your apple tree," though I always felt that Ralph deserved credit too.

I will never forget seeing her from the tree -- frail as a bird and tough as a horse. Connie was ever a creature of contradiction. While usually dressed like a hobo, she was as glamorous as any New York socialite at formal occasions. She could be affectionate and loving, or as cruelly cutting as your worst enemy. She would indulge in silly and girly antics at the dinner table ("who’s hoggin' the buddie?") – yet in the next breath she displayed the keen intellect of someone who read widely and in several languages. She was passionate about politics, always advocating a progressive liberal ideology – but also capable of embarrassing elitist or racist snobbery.

Connie was outspoken – in that moment you knew exactly what she was thinking. It never seemed to trouble her that she vacillated between being loving and cruel, a snob and a progressive, an infant and a sage. Hers was not the examined life, but it was lived passionately.


-- Andrew

P.S. Here she is in about 1930: