Sarah Snow

The One I Wish I Could Know

Sarah Snow: The One I Wish I Could Know

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“Our old women are the dark heart of the forest, the stone womb of the mountain, immanent in the living land itself. They’re elemental beings: storm hags, fire keepers, grandmothers of the sea. They show us how to live when everything we thought matters to us has been stripped way; they teach us how to stay rooted in the face of inevitable death. They teach us how to stand firm in the face of all the culture’s bullshit, and laugh.” Sharon Blackie in her book Hagitude

Old ladies hold a special honor in my heart. I love them. As a child I stayed with my grandmother during the summers, helping her make apple pies as she sped through the dough making and apple cutting. We sat together watching General Hospital and she shared the best advice: When you get to the fence, you gotta jump over. She jumped that fence over and over: my grandfather lost everything in the depression, she had cataracts removed when they kept you in traction in the hospital, my grandfather developed typhoid and had a stroke, she ran restaurants on Hampton Beach to make ends meet, and circulatory problems necessitated leg amputations. She was always my Gram, and I was “Buzzbomb.”

As a friend of the family, Aunt Susie took a prime spot in my childhood. Diminutive and gentle, I loved to feed her goldfish and look at her African violet collection on the little table in front of the window by her wooden rocking chair. Later, I accompanied my mother when she visited Aunt Susie in the nursing home where she had a stroke. Always with a curious smile and twinkling eyes, it seemed she treasured those visits. Hers was the first dead body and funeral I attended. I was 14.

Auntie Vi, my mother’s cousin, a 1931 graduate of Boston University, was my favorite old lady. She was indomitable: living alone after her husband died when she was just 67, bumping up and down the stairs so she could sleep in her bedroom on the second floor, (when she could no longer climb them), keeper of the family genealogy. I loved visiting her because she always had a joke and a wink. She looked like a proper person but inside she was a card. Her best line? “You know dear, you can do anything!”

My Aunt Jan was a party girl! She had a ‘bloody’ every day, smoked cigarettes and drew friends and family into her life like a magnet. We all wanted some of that ‘hurrah’ fun she created all around her. When her daughter turned on her she said, “No one has the right to ruin my life,” and carried on working into her 80s, socializing with her friends Rubelle, Dofo, Punkie, and Kannie, although they called each other ‘Mario.’

“When a woman whispers her fears to her ancestors, a thousand grandmothers answer her call.” Ubaka Hill

My motherline, Raenette, Lucy, Amelia, Nancy, Mary, Margaret, Rebecca, Elizabeth, Sarah, Hannah, Reana, and Agnes, forms a spiral around me. They created me. They are me. Especially Sarah Snow. Born in 1672 in Woburn, MA, she was the oldest daughter, so that when her mother died delivering her youngest child in 1686, it befell to Sarah, at 14 years old, to care for her newborn sister, as well as her siblings, aged 12, 9, and 3. After taking on these responsibilities when her beloved mother passed, what was her experience when her father remarried 2 months later? Relief, or resentment? I identify with Sarah because I too was pushed forward in my life when I gave birth to my oldest son when I was 15. But also because when the going gets tough, she and I were the ones to hold up the world.

“I am a daughter, sister, mother in thousands of generations of women, women whose skills created peaceful and bountiful civilizations, women who preserved remnants of our knowledge when civilizations passed. I am a woman. In me lives the knowledge and experience of all beings. I can use that knowledge and experience to create a loving spontaneous world. I am a woman, a part of and the whole of the first circle, the circle that transcends space and time, the circle of women joined. I am a woman, a human being of extraordinary strength, wisdom, and grace.” Ann Valiant

Tell me about your women, the ladies who created you. What did you learn from them, how do you honor them? Let’s remember them with sweet, abiding love.