Margaret Hart

The summer our porch was rebuilt, Margaret and I shared a bedroom. She was eight and I was three, and she sang me to sleep every night with the same song. She couldn't hold a note to save her life.

I've recorded it the way she sang it, wrong notes and all, because that's the version I still hear when I can't sleep.

Joan singing the lullaby the way Margaret did.

In eighth grade Margaret found a mistake in our classroom encyclopedia. The map of Wisconsin had our town on the wrong side of the river. She wrote to the publisher in Chicago in her best handwriting, and four months later a letter came back thanking her and promising to fix it in the next edition. Mrs. Becker read it out to the whole class. Margaret pretended to be embarrassed, but she kept that letter in her pencil box until high school.

Grandma told this one every Thanksgiving. Grandpa offered her half his umbrella at a bus stop in the rain, and she said no, because she had her own. Then she got on his bus anyway, even though it went the wrong way.

Every year Grandpa corrected one detail and every year she ignored him. I heard it more times than anyone, so I've recorded it the way she told it.

Nora telling it the way Grandma did.

Six of us put in forty dollars between us, borrowed my cousin's VW bus and drove to Green Lake for a week. Margaret was the only one who could read a map, so she rode up front and called out the turns like a train conductor.

The first photo is the jetty on the second day. That's her with her feet in the water, refusing to jump. On the last afternoon she jumped in with all her clothes on, and she never did tell us why.

Frank and Margaret moved in across the hall from my wife and me in September 1965. Our kitchens shared a wall, and it was thinner than any of us realized, so for two years we knew what the Harts were having for dinner before they did. When we moved out, she gave us a casserole dish with a note taped to the lid that said "so you don't starve". We used it for forty years.

Her church paired us up in 1968, a nurse in Wisconsin and a schoolteacher in Scotland, and we wrote to each other for forty-three years. We met once, in 1994, for two hours at O'Hare between my flights. She brought a thermos of coffee and a list of questions she'd been saving.

In 2011 her granddaughter set her up with email and the letters stopped, though her emails were just as long. The photo is her letters, still tied up the way they arrived.

Mom planted her first row of tomatoes the spring they moved into the house, two years before I was born, and she talked to those plants every summer after that. Not quietly, either. She told them about the weather, the neighbors and whichever of us kids was in trouble.

I asked her once if she thought it helped. She said, "It helps me."

I took the video last August. I was supposed to be helping her stake the vines, and instead I stood there filming her give the Early Girls a pep talk. In the recording I'm trying to remember everything she used to say to them. I got about half of it.

0:22

Ellen remembering what Mom said to the tomatoes.

Our furnace broke on December 22nd, so that Christmas all four of us moved in with Aunt Margaret. She didn't make a fuss. She hung a second stocking on every hook and wrote our names on them in laundry marker. I'm the one on the left in the first photo. I still have the stocking.

I stood behind Margaret in the St. Luke's choir for forty years, so I know the back of her head better than her face. Alto, third row, second from the end. She always came in half a beat early on the Hallelujah, and after a while the rest of us just came in with her.

The recording is me telling the story of the Christmas Eve the organ gave out and she started the carol herself.

Margaret trained me on nights at St. Mary's when I was twenty-two and terrified. She had one rule. Never walk past a call light, even if it isn't your patient. I've trained a lot of nurses since then, and it's still the first thing I tell them.

Every summer we spent a week at the lake, and Mom spent most of that week in the same folding chair at the end of the dock, with a paperback and a thermos of iced tea. She wasn't much of a swimmer. She said someone had to keep count of us, and every so often she'd call our names across the water just to hear us answer.

The chair itself was nothing special. Green and white webbing, one arm held on with fishing line after the summer my brother David sat in it. She wouldn't replace it. When the webbing finally went in 1988, she had Dad restring it, and it lasted another twenty years in the garage after the lake trips stopped.

I was twelve when the first of these photos was taken, and I thought she was missing out. She never swam, never took the boat out, never once came down the rope swing. I remember being embarrassed about it in front of the cousins. I understand it now. That chair was the one place all week where nobody needed anything from her, and she could still see all of us.

It turns out it was the same lake where she spent the VW bus summer with Sam and the others. None of us knew that until we read his story here.

Me telling the story of the week the boat sank.

Dad filmed eight seconds of her from the dock in 1983, on a camcorder he'd borrowed from work. She's reading, and she looks up and waves him off. It's the only moving picture of her from those years, and it's the one I watch.

0:08

We still have the chair. It's in my garage now, and I haven't decided what to do with it. I suspect nothing.

I got a flat outside our house at midnight, coming home from a late shift, and I was standing there holding the jack upside down when Margaret came out in her robe with a flashlight. She'd seen me from her window. She changed the tire herself while I held the light, then made me come in for cocoa until my hands stopped shaking.

The next spring I got another flat, and she made me change that one while she held the light.

Margaret and I worked the same floor at St. Mary's from 1989 until she retired. She kept a spare pair of reading glasses in the top drawer at the nurses' station for anyone who'd left theirs at home, and a list of everyone's birthdays taped inside her locker. She never missed one.

The winter my car gave out, she picked me up every morning for six weeks and wouldn't take a dollar for gas. When I got the car back, she left a bag of butterscotch on my chair with a note that said "for the road". I still have the note.

It was Uncle Frank's fiftieth, and she'd made a three-layer cake in ninety-degree heat. It made it as far as the table. By the time we finished singing, the top layer had slid halfway to the lemonade. Margaret looked at it, said "Well, it's still cake", and cut it sideways. Everybody had seconds.

Every Thanksgiving I asked for her pie crust recipe, and every Thanksgiving she said she'd write it down. In 1992 she finally handed me a recipe card face down and told me not to read it until I got home. It said "Cold butter, cold hands, and don't rush it." That was the whole card. My crust has never been as good as hers, and I've stopped expecting it to be.

The year snow closed the interstate the day before Thanksgiving, everyone who couldn't get home came to Margaret's instead. Thirty-one people, one oven, and she never once looked worried. She sent the teenagers to the neighbors for chairs and put the men in charge of the gravy so they'd stay out of her kitchen.

I took this photo at about nine, when the second turkey came out. That's her at the back with her sleeves rolled up, laughing at something my brother said.

Mom called every Sunday at four, whether I wanted to talk or not. I tried to write this one down and couldn't, so I recorded it instead. It's mostly about the ring of the phone.

My first summer with Ellen's family, Margaret rented three cottages on the same beach and invited every cousin she could reach. I counted twenty-seven people before I lost track of the kids. I'd been nervous about meeting them all at once. By the second day she had me in charge of the grill, which I think was her way of telling everyone I was staying.

The video is the first afternoon, when somebody shouted "last one in" and every kid on the beach ran for the water.

0:31

From a story card, typed in by Ellen.

Every Christmas Eve for 20 years, a cinnamon loaf appeared on our porch. No note. We only learned it was Margaret when my son caught her at 6 a.m., in her slippers. We've watched for her every year since. I'll miss that.

I mowed Mrs. Hart's lawn every Saturday from sixth grade until I left for college. She paid me ten dollars and a slice of whatever pie she'd made that week, and she always threw in some advice I hadn't asked for. Most of it was about girls, and most of it turned out to be right.

The last summer, she asked what I wanted to study. I said I didn't know. She said, "Good. Then you'll listen."

Grandma taught me gin rummy when I was eight, and she never once let me win. Last spring I finally beat her, fair and square, and she shook my hand across the kitchen table like I'd won a tournament.

Grandma taught me to drive in the St. Luke's parking lot on Tuesday evenings, in the Buick she'd had since before I was born. For the first three weeks she kept her hand over mine on the gear shift.

On the last Tuesday in June she got out, stood at the edge of the lot with my phone, and filmed my first lap on my own. You can hear her say "again" eleven times.

0:48

I recorded the rest of the story, because I couldn't type it without stopping.

Typed in by her mom, Nora.

Great-Grandma kept butterscotch in the dish by the front door, and she let me take two, or three if Mom wasn't looking.