Kids will groan when you tell a story, complaining that they've heard it a hundred times. Then, one day, unaccountably, they'll ask you to tell it again. Go figure.
A few years ago, I got an email from a distant cousin who
informed me that the town of Nephi (about 90 miles south of Salt Lake City) had
an old cemetery that was nearly full, with room left for only a few family
members of those already interred. Would
I like to reserve a spot?
As a kid, I had spent many wonderful times in Nephi visiting
my Uncle Rulon’s family, especially my cousin Niles, since we were the same age, and also because Niles knew a
million places where young boys could play in and around the dirt roads and irrigation ditches of that
rural community. Even so, I declined the
opportunity to be planted there.
But the email reminded me of an event at my parents' house in Temple City when I was back visiting home in southern California, I guess
sometime in my 30s. They had invited a bunch of family members to dinner, including my dad’s mother, Grandma Alice, and his older
sister, Aunt Valate. This was after Grandma had had the misfortune to develop some kind of heart problem while visiting Los Angeles from Salt Lake City, and
was deemed permanently too ill to make the trip back to Utah. So she had moved in with my widowed
aunt. At this time, Grandma was in her
90s.
The dinner went well, and afterwards we all sat chatting
in my parents' living room. Eventually Aunt Valate
said, solicitously, "Mother, don’t you think it's about time to go home?"
"Well, all right, Valate," my grandmother said mildly,
"if you're tired."
I managed not to laugh out loud then, but I've done so ever since, every time I've thought of it. I'm laughing now.
The next day, while peeling spuds with my dad for another
dinner, I repeated the exchange between Grandma and Aunt Valate, and said to my dad, "Gee,
Grandma's got a bit of a tart tongue, doesn't she?"
My dad replied immediately, "Well, she's a
Carter."
I was struck by the fact that, after roughly 75 years of birthing
and raising seven kids on an isolated ranch outside of Nephi in Utah, to say nothing of putting
up with about a billion other Broadheads, somehow Grandma hadn’t yet gained full membership in the organization. There was still that Carter asterisk. Broadheads are a tough crowd.
A year or so later, I visited Grandma Alice at my
aunt’s house in Burbank. She was nearly 96 then, and failing, so that she rarely
even recognized my father when he visited her each week. I was on my way home from northern
California, and stopped off to see if I could say hello. Luckily, she was on top of her game and in good
spirits that day, and we had a nice chat for nearly an hour.
At one point, I asked her how she made the wonderful shadow-boxes
that had hung in their house in Salt Lake City, each about a foot and a half
wide, maybe two feet high, and a few inches deep--and each filled with brilliantly-colored floral
arrangements made out of dyed feathers. I know that this sounds a bit like oil paintings of toreadors on black velvet, but they were very beautiful and subtle. They ought to be in an art museum if they aren't already.
She was just a young girl when she made them, and she was a bit daunted by the task of fetching a crucial, especially prized, highly delicate
feather that had to be plucked from the posterior of a farm goose at the original Four Mile Ranch. Apparently the goose's artistic sensibilities
were not developed enough to make it fully cooperative, and it put up a heck of
a battle, continually flapping its strong wings and beating young Alice Ann about the head
and shoulders. She said she heard bells
ringing in her head for several days afterwards—but she got the feather.
Of course. She was a Carter.
I often told these stories to my daughter Emily,
great-grand-daughter of Alice, and apparently she took them to heart. When she gave birth to her second daughter,
she and husband Kevin named her Savannah Carter Kuhlman.
SAVANNAH KUHLMAN
Miss Carter to
you.
