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Martha Gerdeman: South doesn’t hold monopoly on strange relatives




Gerdeman

Gerdeman

It’s been more than 50 years since I left Yankeeland and moved south. It didn’t take me long, however, to learn that a great deal of things y’all think of as typically Southern are really typically rural.

During all the years that I spent in a high school classroom, for example, it amused me to learn that if I suggested that “he don’t” or “we done” was not standard English, my students thought I was attacking their Southernhood, whatever that is. They never quite believed me that folks in rural Ohio used the same expressions.

There are also foods that people think are typically Southern but are really more typically country. I grew up eating white beans and cornbread, just as many of you did. Admittedly we never had okra, but that’s because the growing season was too short. And after family dinners, I enjoyed listening to my dad and his brothers. “You remember Sally So-and-so?”

“Oh, yeah. Didn’t she live up on Bristle Ridge?”

“That’s right, and her daddy was cousin of my grandpa. My best friend used to date her sister.”

 

 

Y’all don’t even have a monopoly on weird family members. Perhaps my weirdest relative — thankfully by marriage, not blood — was great-aunt Clara, the Morbid Moron.

My grandfather had two older brothers. I vaguely remember Uncle Clifton, who had married his second cousin and was widowed soon after. He lived with Grandma and Grandpa when I was very small.

The other brother was Uncle George, a confirmed old bachelor who lived with their mother less than a quarter mile up the road. Grandmother Folsom was afflicted with senile dementia, and it reached the point that the family had to hire someone to look after her. The woman they hired left after a year or so to get married, so her sister took over.

Now this sister was Clara, who was a widow. Somehow she worked her way into Uncle George’s bachelor affections and they were married. Uncle George died without a will, so Aunt Clara was his only legal heir. And somehow the farm and all the personal property ended up having to be sold. Anything that the other brothers wanted from their family home had to be purchased at the auction.

None of this, however, explains the family designation of “Aunt Clara, the Morbid Moron.”

My mother’s only sister, Esther, was the oldest of the children and enrolled at Capitol University in Columbus, Ohio. Within a year of enrolling, she became sick with tuberculosis. This was at least two decades before penicillin was developed. The only cure for TB was bed rest, accompanied by fresh air. The family screened in the front porch and Esther spent 18 months in bed there.

Aunt Clara would walk down from her house to visit and comfort the afflicted. Her kind attentions included talking about a relative of hers who had cancer and saying to Esther, “I don’t know which is worse, cancer or tuberculosis. Either one is dying by inches.”

She also worried at length about the sick relative whose children had to cross a railroad track on the way to school and who, she thought, were bound to be hit by a train.

Hence the morbid title. I’m told she also said things like “Why should I wear a corset? I’m married.” And “I went barefoot when I lived with my first husband.”

Clara was long gone from the county by the time I was old enough to remember much, but one thing I do recall is being with someone who stopped to visit her once. The only thing I remember is that she had her nylon stockings rolled down around her ankles. I had never seen anyone do that, and it impressed me as pretty doggoned strange.

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