Rainy Acres
Streator, Illinois
Rainy Acres. Aino wrote those words at the top of her letter to my mother. I’m estimating that Aino mailed this letter forty five years ago. My mother so rarely wrote back, but she visited for Sunday dinner when we visited Detroit, bringing her husband Ed and all four grandchildren, Matthew, Eddie and Annie-Marie and myself.
That made for an adequate reply. After an incredible dinner served family style upon her kitchen table, Aino would send us home with a week’s worth of groceries. She even added a bag of Trenary Toast, a cinnamon toast baked in the Upper Peninsula town of Trenary.
Daily, Aino sat at her oak kitchen table, covered with a lovely lace tablecloth on ordinary days and wrote, looking out into her yard. Her hands had suffered the pain of arthritis by then, making them tight at the joints. She drank coffee in the morning because she could feel her joints loosening after a few cups.
One day, she looked out over the back yard gardens, and noticed the flooding of the grassy back acre. She wrote “Rainy Acres”. I read the letter. The letters weren’t addressed to me, but mother left them open on our dining room table, fair game.
Aino said “Love built this house for me”, in one of her poems. She recited the poem to me one day as I read “The Razor’s Edge” by W. Somerset Maugham, sitting on my Grandfather’s Lazy Boy. She never moved the chair from its corner, near the bookshelf, after his passing.
The couple had purchased five acres of land north of Eight Mile when the land was all farms. He had constructed the bungalow himself using plans published in the Chrysler Motors employee bulletin. He added an enclosed porch, put a pool table in the basement and set up a workshop where he could do almost everything, from cutting a gear to tying a fly. Love certainly did build the house for her. The couple turned the yard into an orchard, planting apples and pear trees and a small vineyard. The two rocked on a cedar glider and let night fall through the warmer months.
Rainy acres. I thought of this pair of words this rainy morning as I gazed out a back window and drank coffee. The daffodils along the fence were off their blossom. A wooden bird house that had turned gray and strange stood on a pole, awaiting a pair of birds daring enough to make a nest inside. The maple tree trembled at twig tips, moments from unfurling leaves for the spring. Almost five decades later, I had unraveled my Grandmother’s short poem.
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