I opened it at her kitchen table. The second I saw what my grandmother had hidden inside that grinder all those years, I had to sit down, because paper came out of it like feathers out of a split pillow.
Little rolls. Hundreds of them. Each one a strip about two inches by four, rolled tight as a cigarette and tied with a single wrap of white thread off her own spool.
Sixty-three of them, once I got them counted and sorted.
One for every fall.
She ground sausage the first Saturday of November from 1959 until the November before she died, and she never let a soul touch that grinder, and the whole family had a running joke about it for three generations. Grandma and her grinder. Don’t you touch it.
Every year, when the work was done and the kitchen was empty and the jars were cooling, that woman sat down alone at her table and wrote down one thing on a scrap of butcher paper, and rolled it, and dropped it down the hopper, and screwed the bottom plate back on.
They were dated. Every last one.
1959, the first year she was married, is one line and I read it about forty times before I could go on to the next one:
“Nov. 1959 — the house is cold and we have $19 and I am not one bit frightened. That is the thing I am putting down.”
They are not what you’d guess. They are not thankful-for-my-family, not most of them. She was a plainer woman than that.
1963 is about a hen. 1971 is four words about my grandfather’s back finally healing. 1968 is the hardest one in the jar and it is about a baby, a girl, born early in the spring of that year, who lived nine days, and whose name I had never once heard spoken out loud in that house in my entire life.
My father was born in 1970. He is sixty now, and he sat at that same table in March and read the one from 1968, and then he went out to the porch for a while, and then he came back in and read the rest of them.
1994 is about me. I was seven. Apparently I told her that her kitchen smelled like church, and she wrote it down, and I have absolutely no memory of saying it.
2019 says her hands hurt and she got it done anyway.
The last one, 2021, was written six months before she passed, and it is the only one that is addressed to anybody. It says whoever gets this thing open is the one who was paying attention, and to go on and use it, and to keep it up if they’ve got the sense.
We ground sausage in November. My father cranked, my daughter fed the hopper, and it was a disaster and we did it anyway.
When the kitchen cleared out I sat down at her table with a strip of butcher paper and a pen, and I’ll tell you honestly it took me an hour to get one true line down.
Then I rolled it, and tied it with white thread, and dropped it in, and screwed the plate back on.
Sixty-four now.