For My Grandmother Effie

Effie Dickey Dean
10/25/1884 – 10/26/1951

By Moristotle

My father’s mother became distant to me

in a way that can happen between a woman

and her mother-in-law to be,

especially one strong and outspoken

like Effie Dickey Dean,

who made her opinions known,

like the poet James Dickey she might have been related to,

who said if anything he wrote sounded like Robert Frost

he would flush it down the toilet.

My father married the woman anyway,
but a gulf so wide was fixed
I only ever saw Effie a few times,
one that I remember,
when she was terminally ill
and lying in her bed.

Effie had lived through hard times,
like other country wives.
She came from a large family, married at nineteen,
and birthed eleven children of her own.
Jeff my father was her first.
William his father died in a sawmill accident
in nineteen thirty-one.

Effie had a ringer washing machine,
and dried clothes and towels and sheets on a line.
Her days were long, her rest was short.
How many of her hopes and dreams came true?
How many did not?

Five of Effie’s nine sons joined up
and lived to gather in California
and be portrayed in proud uniforms and brilliant smiles
in treasured family photographs:
Claude, Hugh, Berry, Garland, RJ.

Her daughter Virgie lived the shortest life of all her children,
even Raymond, who fell off a chair as a child
and never was right in the head.

Virgie’s daughter, Evelyn,
whom gulf had not distanced,
remembers Effie’s 4-layer cakes with lemon filling
and 7-minute frosting with coconut
served at family dinners.

Effie let young Evelyn brush her long gray hair
and sit beside her at the table.
One evening Effie said in her ear
she didn’t like Aunt Sue’s boyfriend’s moustache,
and Evelyn playfully whispered it to him.
The boy didn’t come to another family gathering.

I’m sorry I never knew you, Effie,
and sorry you did not know me either.
We might have liked each other
even if, a hundred years ago,
you did shake a finger at my mother
and cut her deep with your decree,
“You ain’t nothing but a holiness!”

Copyright © 2023 by Moristotle