My goodness. It gives me great pleasure to type my grandmother's history because I get to read it again. Such a wonderful childhood she had. I thought, even when she was alive, that she had lived the most interesting span of time that any human being ever had. She went from the horse and buggy era to seeing a man land on the moon! Imagine.* The winter scene just posted reminds me very much of the way that James Fenimore Cooper describes, from his childhood memories, a turn of the nineteenth century winter scene in his realistic novel, The Pioneers, one of my favorite books. The subtitle of The Pioneers is Sources of the Susquehanna, the main branch in upstate New York, not the West Branch in western Pennsylvania. Frontier life had not much changed in the northeast United States in those hundred years.
*The photograph above is wonderful metaphor for the changes Mrs. Gill saw. As a child she knew the Kittanning Path as "the old Indian trail"--and lived long enough to see it cut through with paved roads for automobiles.**
**Which reminds me...I do not recall if Mrs. Gill treats of this subject later in her writing so her grandson will now: Daniel Garman was one of the first people in the area to buy a car. Imagine that when you've only been used to horses! Crank what? The gear shift, the pedals, all those mechanical things, oh jeez. So it was a real event when he got a car and everybody came out to see. Somebody gave him instruction on how everything worked. It was an uncertain period of instruction imperfectly comprehended but after a skittish beginning he managed to get the hang of it and proudly drove a short distance as a "test drive" and all the family and neighbors were impressed. Came then time to put the new horseless carriage in the ol' barn, as it were, an ol' barn being what it really was. He got the thing into reverse. Gave it a little gas. Gave it a little too much gas for his comfort, misremembered his instruction on that mechanical thing called "the brake," reverted to old habits and shouted "Whoa!," and drove the car straight through the back wall of the ol' barn. Imagine.
