ANNE & AGNES CASHEN circa 1902

Her name was Agnes. She was born in January,1898, the youngest of three girls. They lived contentedly and happily with their Papa and Mama on a small dirt-farm in central Illinois. During the winter of 1901, the eldest sister got very sick. Papa and Mama said that she had, caught the "grippe," and they seemed real scared.

Agnes, age 3, and Anne, age 5, were not allowed to enter the bedroom where their parents diligently and gently tended to their gravely ill child. Papa said that she was nearly as hot-to-the-touch as their iron cook-stove and as weak as a newborn pup. And her voice, whenever she moaned, got smaller and smaller…

Two days later, Papa caught the “grippe” too and Mama was tending to them both. Agnes and Anne kept putting split logs into the cook-stove to keep the parlor and the stockpot of beef-broth warm. The next day their sister died. Mama dug her grave under the old oak, out back, where her rope-swing continued to sway in the gray breeze, dressed her body in her, “Sunday, go-to-mass,” clothes and buried her eldest girl, while awash in silent tears. Then she went straight back to tending Papa. 

Papa died the next day. Mama dug his grave under the mighty pine where they had, "sparked," as youngsters and where he had proposed under a glowing harvest moon. She dressed his body in his, “wedding duds,” and buried her lifetime love. Her tears were no longer silent, accompanied by the banshee wails of overpowering grief. 

Mama stripped the beds, took the linens outside and made a bonfire of them. She dumped all the broth from the stockpot, boiled water to sterilize it, then took salt-pork, potatoes and other vegetables and made a big new mess of vegetable soup. She disinfected every surface she could with rubbing alcohol and what was left of Papa’s Irish Whiskey. She gave the girls a rigorous scrubbing, combed and braided their hair and dressed them in their flannel nightgowns and nightcaps. All the while, Mama still seemed afraid, though she tried hard not to show it. And she wouldn’t hug or kiss them and made them ladle-up their own soup. 

The next morning, Mama called out from her room that she was sick too and that Agnes and Anne couldn’t come in or see her. She gave them instructions on how to carefully cut-up and add new vegetables to the simmering soup, each time they ate, and to keep the pot simmering at all times. She told them where the hard-tack and home-canned jams were stored. She told them to take the metal sprinkling can, fill it with snow and let it melt when they needed drinking water. She talked and reassured her small daughters, until she was simply too weak to speak. 

Agnes and Anne never knew how many days went by after Mama stopped talking, but one day a neighboring farmer decided to stop by to, “set a spell,” and found them, alone in the parlor, stoking the stove. He found Mama’s body in the separate, closed bedroom and took note of the two new graves out back. He took the girls to his own place and he and his wife buried their Mama, right next to Papa. 

Agnes and Anne were sent to the Catholic orphanage, located in Nauvoo, Illinois. Sometime during their first year there, Anne also died and Agnes was the sole survivor of the original Cashen clan of five. For eighteen years, the Benedictine nuns raised her lovingly and kindly. (Later, they provided her with a college education, during those days when it was nearly unheard of for a female to attend an institution of higher learning.)     

Every summer, the adolescent and teenaged orphans were assigned to neighboring farm families, for a change of scenery, to feel close to the land and to be extra helpers during the growing season. Agnes was assigned to the same family, summer after summer. The parents and every one of their 13 children had come to love her dearly and requested her, year after year. She loved them back and eventually married the third-eldest son, Thomas Cannon, when he returned from the French trenches of WWI. 

Agnes was my maternal grandmother.

She was diminutive in stature and mighty in spirit, plain of face and garb and elegant in heart and intellect. She possessed an impressive repertoire of a gazillion sage sayings and witticisms, but when, after nearly fifty years, she looked at my grandpa with the saucy wink of a lass and a gleam in her eye and said, “Good things come to those who wait,” she made me believe.

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                                                  MAUDE REIG circa 1908

Her name was Maude. She was born in May of 1906, the youngest of three girls, with one older brother. They lived with their father and mother, on a working farm (livestock, grain and produce) in west-central Illinois.  

During the winter of 1908, when Maude was barely 2 years old, their mother died of “consumption.” Father remarried almost immediately.  Their new stepmother was a “hard” woman with no patience for affection. She was a stern mistress and was strict in her “oversight” of her husband’s children. Lest Maude be,“spoiled,” as the youngest child, the stepmother was particularly focused on her, when it came to corporal discipline. 

Two years later their father died. Life was regimented and unhappy in the stepmother’s home. When she was 12 years old, her newly married brother, Fred, took all three of his younger sisters, Josie, Laura and Maude, into his own home, in town. And there they remained until they finished high-school and married. Life was easier in Fred’s home, but the Reig stoic legacy lacked room for displays of affection. 

Maude was a petite, perky, brunette and popular in high school. She sang in the chorus, starred in musical productions and plays and was a guard on the girls’ basketball team. 

She had no steady beau, but was curious about those roudy Seei boys (pronounced: see-eye…don’t ask) from the dairy farm, down the road. There was a passel of them, 5 or 6, and one better lookin’ than the next. They were known all over the county for their wild ways of drinking, fighting, swearing and general cutting-up on Saturday nights. Coming from such a rigid home-life, she was intrigued. 

Emil, one of the brothers, worked on construction of the new church steeple. One afternoon, as Maude left the library, crossed the street and passed under his ladder, she caught his eye. He dropped a nail into the brim of her hat and when she looked up in anger, he was grinning from ear-to-ear. She was an instant goner and he told his co-workers, “There’s the gal I’m gonna’ marry.” And darned, if he didn’t. 

Maude had never once heard the words, “I love you,” until he whispered them to her. She spent the remainder her life proving herself worthy of that love. 

Maude was my paternal grandmother.

I recently read her handwritten entry into my dad’s baby book, dated August 8,1929:

I took Junior, age 2, to the grocer's this afternoon. He was such a good little boy and I told him he could have anything he wanted to take home with us. His eyes lit up, he pointed to a watermelon and squealed, “That’s what I want…Look, Mama, a giant cucumber!” 

She lived more than 50 years as a dutiful and adoring wife and another 30 as a widow, who cherished her secret memories of grandpa. She lived a total of 97 years. Shaky start, but GREAT finish, Maude!