Overdue Visit to Relatives Long Gone

 How long had it been since I’d visited my country relatives?

  Twenty years?

  Thirty years?

  Longer?

  Not that they minded, of course. They’ve all been dead longer than that.

  My country relatives were my Great Grandmother Susie, my Great Aunt and Uncle Amy and Adolph and my Uncle Weldon.

  Every year on Memorial Day, I put flowers on the graves of my parents at Boise’s Morris Hill Cemetery. This year, having done that, I decided to do something different a few days after Memorial Day and pay overdue respects to the country relatives buried in the Star Cemetery.

  It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I didn’t think to bring flowers, and it had been so long since my last visit that I’d forgotten how to get there (Thank you, Google Maps). The cemetery even looked different, larger and with fewer trees than I remembered.

  No cemetery workers were around to help with directions; it took a lot of tromping around in a hot sun to find all the graves. The first was Grandma Susie’s. 

  Susan Marguerite McCoy Cuddy Chandler was born 18 days before Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, officially ending the Civil War. According to family lore, she came west from her native Iowa in a covered wagon.

  One of my earliest memories of her is of Thanksgiving dinner at her home in Notus, a town of about 500, northwest of Caldwell. It allegedly was named by a railroad official’s daughter who thought Notus was a Native American word for “it’s all right.” It was all right with Grandma Susie, who with her last husband, Harry Chandler, lived there for many years.

  She outlived three husbands and all but one of her children but remained positive and jovial right to the end, dying in 1956 at age 91. My most vivid memory of her is of her long hair catching fire in the toaster during one of her visits to our home in Boise. She thought it was so funny that she laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks. Her sense of humor undoubtedly helped her deal with the tragedies of her life. 

  One of the things that made the Thanksgiving dinner in Notus memorable was the main course – roast goose instead of turkey. Harry, who also is buried in the Star Cemetery, probably shot the goose. 

  The following year, they came to our house for Thanksgiving. That dinner was memorable in a different way. Harry slumped over at the table and was carried upstairs, where he died of a heart attack. He was a nice man who wore three-piece suits and a gold pocket watch on a chain when they came to visit. He invariably brought me a pocketful of pennies.

  The only one of my great grandmother’s children to outlive her was my Aunt Amy Schneckloth, who with her husband, Adolph, and one of her sons, Weldon, lived on a farm between Star and Middleton. All three are buried in the Star Cemetery. My overdue visit there was a chance to catch up, at least with Aunt Amy. Uncle Adolph and Uncle Weldon were old-school farmers, strong, silent types about as talkative as the Sphinx.

  It was easy to imagine Aunt Amy greeting me in her kindly but bustling, business-like fashion. Her appearance was such that she could have come straight out of the “Wizard of Oz.” Baggy, mid-calf dresses with high collars and rolled-up sleeves, nylons with seams down the back, black, low-heeled work shoes and an ever-present apron. She’d have made a first-rate Aunty Em.

  The Memorial Day feast at the Schneckloth farm was one never to be forgotten, even these many, long years later. Wooden picnic tables in the back yard all but overflowed with salads, bowls of quivering, fruit-filled Jell-O, potato salad, homemade Parker House Rolls fresh from the oven in the wood-fired Monarch Stove, homemade pies and homemade ice cream and, the piece de resistance, Aunt Amy’s famous fried chicken.

  Preparation of the chicken was, shall we say, indelicate by today’s standards. No chicken from Albertsons or M&W for Aunt Amy. The main course began with me catching chickens in the barnyard. From the depths of her apron, she produced a beat-up hatchet and lopped off their heads. Plucked and cleaned, they were off to the kitchen, where she worked her magic. The result – oiled, sprinkled with flour and spices and fried to perfection – was, in memory at least, the best fried chicken ever.

  Uncle Adolph is buried next to her, Uncle Weldon not far away. The only times I ever saw them in anything but work shirts and bib overalls was when they drove their ancient Austin sedan to our house for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners. They invariably wore suits that were old-fashioned even then, set off by colorful, hand-painted ties. They always left early, ostensibly to get home in time to milk the cows, but it’s a good bet that they also were itching to get out of the suits and back into their overalls.

  My visit to the Star Cemetery brought a profusion of memories, mixed with a dash of guilt. It had been far too long since I’d paid my respects to those good people.

  Next year I won’t wait until after Memorial Day to do that. I’ll go at a  proper time, before Memorial Day.

  And bring flowers.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at  woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.