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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
October 11, 2020
Published as a Gramma Letter
dated October 11, 1994.
© 1994, 2020 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Farmhouse Cellar (1968)
© 1968 by Bud Grossmann
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VOICES IN THE CELLAR
Tuesday, October 11, 1994
Dear Gramma,
Twice a day we gathered eggs and twice a day we washed them. The summer I am remembering, in the early 1960’s, you and Grampa raised something like—do I recall this correctly?—fifteen hundred Leghorn hens from chicks to adulthood. And because the eggs were sent to a hatchery (can that be right—would we have washed eggs that weren’t destined for someone’s kitchen?), you employed a few dozen very busy, very, shall we say, cheerful roosters. That’s what I remember, but set me straight if I am stating the ratio wrong. You and Grampa—when I was young—spoke almost as guardedly of animal reproduction as you did of baby-making by human beings. So I might be all mixed up on the numbers.
We—that’s you and Grampa and my cousin Terry, my brother Bruce, whoever else was around, and I—gathered eggs in late morning and late afternoon and filled baskets constructed of vinyl-coated wire. When Grampa put the chickens to bed at night, he always found a few eggs more, but these he carried back to the house in the roomy pockets of his bib overalls. The eggs went down into your cellar where we set the wire baskets, one at a time, into a special washing tub filled with water and mild detergent. After this electric-powered washer had gently agitated its fragile load for a few minutes, we lifted the basket, let it drain, and set it on a stool. We placed another basket in the tub, and began wiping each damp egg clean and dry with a dish towel before placing it in a cardboard “flat” of two-and-a-half-dozen egg cups. We stacked the flats in strong cardboard boxes, and twice a week The Egg Man came to take them to the hatchery. Again I am wondering about my accuracy here—can chicks come from eggs so long separated from the warmth of mother hen or incubator? Well, never mind, I’m not teaching poultry science. Let me just talk about the egg washer.
Washing eggs was not especially hard work. Standing for hours in a cool cellar beneath the glare of a bare hundred-watt bulb couldn’t compare to stacking baled hay in a rolling rack out in the heat and humidity of a Wisconsin summer. Washing eggs was nowhere near as unpleasant as bagging combined oats in the blazing sun, with the prickly chaff finding its way onto every itchy inch of our skin, covered or not.
But washing eggs was tedious, mind-dulling labor, and sometimes, when our conversation began to wear thin, the egg washer tub itself—with its incessant, back-and-forth, back-and-forth grind—would start to speak to us. “Grampa, what do you hear?” I asked one time when Gramp and you and I were about halfway through a few hundred eggs.
“Rrrr / rr / rr / rrrr! Shift it in gear; shift it in gear!” said Grampa.
“Hmmm,” said I. “I hear, Spit in your ear; spit in your ear!”
And then, in the next moment, Grampa suffered a serious lapse of good judgment: he created a new rhyme by changing the word “ear” to “beer” and making a small substitution in the word “spit.” He sang it out, in perfect time with the egg washer, and I couldn’t help but giggle, but not you, Granny, you did not giggle nor even smile at all.
No, you found our poetry not the least bit witty. You were holding at that moment a hen’s egg in each hand, and you slammed them both down onto the concrete floor in fury. You stepped over the two glistening puddles of shell, egg white, and golden yolk, and you headed up the cellar steps, snarling at us menfolk as you went. “Do you want to talk like you’re in a tavern?” you asked. “Do you think I can’t talk filthy like that, too?” you cried.
Pausing halfway up the steps, you glared down at us and answered your own question. “Oh, yes, I can!” And you rapidly recited several expressions I had never before heard from your lips, words that I never again heard you say, anytime, anywhere. And then you were gone, and Grampa and I and the egg machine were all by ourselves alone.
We were stunned, my grandfather and I. We were chastened. But I was still trying to choke back my giggles of appreciation for Grampa’s crude rhyme. A moment passed while only the egg machine spoke. Grampa went right on polishing eggs and placing them in the flats, and so I kept working, too, but after a while Gramp asked me, “Do you suppose, Buddy, that maybe the old girl was a little upset?” I agreed, that might have been the case.
You had left us with such a sufficient supply of dirty eggs, that quite some time elapsed before Grampa and I went upstairs to apologize to you. By then you had cooled down, and when I hugged you and said I was sorry, you hugged back and said, “I don’t know why you have to aggravate me so.”
“Well, you’re so much fun to aggravate, Gramma. And can you tell me this,” I asked, “where’d you learn to talk so dirty?”
“Oh, get on out of here!” you ordered. “Or let’s talk about something pleasant, can’t we?”
Write back to me, Grandmother. We’ll talk about anything you want to.
I love you with all my heart.
Love,
Buddy
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© 2020 by Bud Grossmann
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