Falling feathers and Falling in Love


During the depression, Grandma married a man she didn’t love.

Grandpa was an orphan who’d left the orphanage at 18 and was working as an embalmer in a distant relative’s funeral home.

The distant relative had taken Grandpa under his wing, taught him the trade of fussing with the dead and given him a room to live in -- next to where the bodies were kept.

Grandma says that Grandpa was a “sorry soul” who had no one that loved him. He was short and cocky, Irish as “Paddy’s pig”, freckled and feckless; he’d spend his paycheck on booze and gambling and had no idea how to love himself, never mind love a woman.

But she married him anyhow, because he asked.

And because she didn’t want to be one more person in his life who’d abandoned him.

Grandma says they were married at least three months before the marriage was consummated. Why so long-- we all asked?

One, she didn’t love him. Two, they were living in the room above where her mother slept and Three, she had been trained by the nuns that any sexual activity was bad, and this thought was stronger in her mind than any desire she might have for her new husband; the man she married only because she felt sorry for him.

The marriage was eventually consummated the very first day they moved into their own apartment. It was an attic apartment with no bathroom. They had to go down a flight of stairs and use a shared bathroom that was used by two other families.

Their apartment was either too hot or too cold. The roof leaked and the wind howled through the numerous openings in the clapboard, but it became their home – the first home Grandpa ever had.

Within six months of moving to the apartment, they found themselves penniless. Grandma had to have an emergency appendectomy and almost died. They had no insurance. Grandpa had been fired from his job as embalmer for sleeping somewhere other than next to the dead bodies. (His relative insisted this was part of the job description. If he’d be willing to sleep with the dead, he could get his job back, but not until then.)

Bills mounted and they were three months behind in the rent. Grandpa couldn’t find a new job. Grandma was still recovering from major surgery. They had bare cupboards and empty wallets and had no choice but to discuss separating.

He would go back to his embalming job and she would go back to living with her mother. They would try to save money. She would find a job when she was feeling better. He would use his spare time to hunt down another job; one where he could sleep at home – if they could find another place to live someday and have food to eat and pay their rent.

The separation would be temporary…

Plans were made to break up their little home. They had so few material possessions they wouldn’t need a truck or even an extra pair of arms for lifting or packing. Wasn’t much they were taking with them as the ripped sofa and worn table and chairs came with the apartment. So did the chipped china and jelly glasses.

The very weekend before they were to split up – Grandpa struck a bargain with the landlord. The landlord would take some money off the last month’s rent if Grandpa would clean out a storage area in the eaves. Anything in there was left by a former tenant who had died and the landlord insisted there was nothing in there he wanted and it all should be thrown out.

Grandpa opened the little door to the crawl space and peeked inside. It was hot and he was damp with perspiration and hopelessness, but he crawled inside and looked around.

Inside the attic he found two down pillows, stained and ancient – hand stitched closed, and he retrieved them. The casings were so dusty and dirty, they couldn’t be used, but he decided he’d take them outside, save the feathers and Grandma could sew up two new pillows they could each take with them to their new sleeping places – a reminder that even though they were sleeping apart, they were both putting their heads down on matching pillows. Maybe this would help them live through the separation, and besides, the pillows they had were filled with cotton scraps and were lumpy and uncomfortable.

So Grandpa filled a bucket with soapy water and split open the pillow cases, dumping the feathers in the water to be cleaned while Grandma stitched up two new rectangles of blue and white striped pillow ticking she had found at her mother’s house.

The first pillow tore with ease and the feathers were picked up by a slight breeze and lifted into the air. Grandpa scurried trying to catch them and pull them down into the water and was able to save most of the feathers.

The second pillow case didn’t tear as easily, so he took out his pocket knife and split it open like a watermelon (Grandma’s description.)

The air was still this time as he dumped the contents into the soapy water.

The feathers floated to the top but so did something else.

Bills, dollar bills and five dollar bills and ten dollar bills and at least six fifty dollar bills. The former tenant had used one of the pillows as a safe place to store her fortune. Now it belonged to Grandma and Grandma.

They were rich!

It was a miracle and Grandma says Grandpa promised he’d go to church every Sunday for the rest of his life for such a blessing, although he never did.

The 487 dollars was a true windfall. They used the money to pay up their rent and had enough left over to open a savings account and that night, went out to a local Italian restaurant for a large bowl of spaghetti and a bottle of Chianti.

They sat in a darkened corner clinking their wineglasses, starry-eyed with happiness and hope for the future and it was at that very moment that Grandma says she fell “head over heels” in love with Grandpa.

She also says they were never that poor again.