The Fellowship
1.
It is not that you are not qualified to receive the fellowship, it is that each year your application is not good enough. When at last your application is perfect, then you will receive the fellowship.
2.
It is not that you are not qualified to receive the fellowship, it is that your patience must be tested first. Each year, you are patient, but not patient enough. When you have truly learned what it is to be patient, so much so that you forget all about the fellowship, then you will receive the fellowship.
Helen and Vi: A Study in Health and Vitality
Introduction
The following study presents the lives of two elderly women still thriving in their eighties and nineties. Although the account will necessarily be incomplete, depending as it does in part on the subjects’ memories, it will be offered in detail whenever possible. Our hope is that, through this close description, some notion may be formed as to which aspects of the subjects’ behaviors and life histories have produced such all-around physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health.
Both women were born in America, one of African-American parents and one of immigrants from Sweden. The first, Vi, is eighty-five years old, currently still in very good health, working four days a week as a house-and office-cleaner, and active in her church. The other, Helen, ninety-two, is in good health apart from her weakened sight and hearing, and though she now resides in a nursing home, she lived alone and independently until one year ago, caring for herself and her large house and yard with minimal help. She still looks after her own hygiene and tidies her room.
Background
Both Vi and Helen grew up in intact families with other children and two caregivers (in Vi’s case these were her grandparents, for many years). Both were close to their siblings (in Vi’s case there were also cousins in the immediate family) and remained in close touch with them throughout their lives. Both have outlived all of them: Helen was predeceased by an older brother who reached the age of ninety and an older sister who died at seventy-eight; Vi by seven brothers, sisters and cousins, all but one of whom lived into their eighties and nineties. Her last remaining cousin died at the age of ninety-four, still going out to work as a cook.
Vi spent most of her childhood in Virginia on her grandparents’ farm. She was one of eight siblings and cousins, all of whom lived with the grandparents and were raised by them up to a certain age. Her grandfather’s farm was surrounded by fields and woods. The children went barefoot most of the time, so their physical contact with the land was constant, and intimate.
The children never saw a doctor. If one of them was sick, Vi’s grandmother would go out into the fields or woods and find a particular kind of bark or leaf, and “boil it up.” Her grandfather taught the children to recognize certain healthful wild plants, and in particular to tell the male from the female of certain flowers, since each had different properties; then they would be sent to gather the plants themselves. As a regular preventive health measure, at the beginning of each season, the grandmother would give them an infusion to “clean them out”; this would, among other benefits, rid them of the parasitic worms that were a common hazard of rural life at that time. When Vi moved up to Poughkeepsie to live with her mother, the home treatments ceased: when she had even a mild cold, her mother would take her to the doctor and he would give her medicines.
Vi’s grandparents were both hard workers. For instance, in addition to her regular work, her grandmother also made quilts for all eight of the children. She would sew after breakfast and again in the afternoon. She enjoyed it, Vi says: she would use every bit of material, including the smallest scraps. Her grandmother’s hands were nice, “straighter than mine,” says Vi. Her grandmother would also sew clothes for the children out of the printed cotton fabric of flour sacks. On the first day of school, says Vi, she and her girl cousins would be wearing “such pretty dresses.”
Her grandmother was a kind woman. Her grandfather, also kind, was stricter. When he said something, he meant it, says Vi. The kids listened to both, but waited until their grandfather was out of the house to make their special requests, because their grandmother was more likely to give them what they wanted.
Her grandfather raised all his own meat and vegetables. He built a house for them all with his own hands. She says her grandfather’s hands were very bent and crooked.
The family slept on straw mattresses. Once a year her grandmother would have the children empty out the old straw and fill them with new. The kids would roll around on the newly filled mattresses to hear them crackle. The mattresses were stuffed so full that before the straw settled, the kids would keep sliding off. The pillows were stuffed with chicken feathers. Once a year, the grandmother would have the children empty out the old feathers and fill them with new feathers she had saved for the purpose.
The children were expected to do their chores without being reminded. If not, they suffered the consequences. Once, Vi says, she forgot to bring water from the spring. When her grandfather, resting from his day’s work, asked for a drink, she admitted that she had forgotten, and he sent her out to fetch it, even though night had fallen. The way to the spring led past the small burial ground where some of the family rested, and she was frightened to walk by it in the dark. The children believed that ghosts roamed around after the sun was down. She had no choice, however, and she crept past the graveyard and down the hill to the spring, filled the bucket, and then ran all the way home again. She says that by the time she was back at the house, the bucket was half empty. She never forgot that chore again.
All the children grew up to be hard workers except the youngest, she says, who was the baby of the family and spoiled, and who did nothing when she grew up but have babies of her own. And, Vi is quick to point out, this sister died at the earliest age of them all, only seventy-two.
Eventually Vi moved north to live with her mother, who had a dairy farm. She continued going to school, in a two-room schoolhouse where the boys sat on one side of the room and the girls on the other. She attended up to the tenth grade. She took piano lessons for a while, and now wishes she had gone on with them, but she was a child who needed to be “pushed,” she says, and her mother did not push her, being too busy. Besides running the farm, her mother worked for a local family for thirty years, mainly cooking.
Vi was married twice. Her first husband was “no good,” she says: he ran after other women. Her second husband was a good man. She wishes she had met him first. The many affectionate stories she tells about him and their life together indicate that their relationship was full of love, mutual appreciation, and good fun. “When I was a Standish,” Vi will say, meaning when she was married to her first husband and bore his name. She will also express it another way: “Before I was a Harriman.”
She had only one child, a daughter by her first husband, but she helped to raise her two granddaughters, who lived with her for a number of years.
Helen, too, grew up on a farm in her early childhood. Her father, soon after coming over from Sweden, acquired several hundred acres of farmland on the outskirts of a Connecticut village on an elevated plateau of land. Below, in the river valley, was a large thread-manufacturing town. He owned a small herd of cows and sold milk to neighboring families. He also raised chickens and bred the cows. He owned a team of horses for plowing, and the family used to go down the long hill into town in a wagon drawn by the two horses, who would be given a rest and a drink halfway down. Her family lived on the farm until Helen was seven, when they moved into town so that her older brother could go to the local high school.