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Directions:Shirley Tanton, who is Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Winston Rumble’s oldest daughter, told me her story about Gramma Bungart.
It was in the late fall when Shirley’s husband Stewart was working with her dad in the field chopping corn for silage. Shirley was in the house helping to take care of her mother who was beginning to loose her battle with breast cancer. Gramma Bungart was there too, but she had gone outside to clean the garden out. Shirley watched from the house as Gramma, wearing an old house dress and worn shoes, pull the dead dried pumpkin and spent squash vines out of the ground and threw them on piles and gathered any remaining vegetables into baskets.
All bent over, Gramma worked, dragging and piling never stopping to take a break. Shirley wasn’t surprised at her grandmother’s focus or how hard she labored. It didn’t matter that Gramma was in her late 70’s. This had always been the way she was - short, stout, strong, and very determined.
Then Shirley noticed it began to rain, sprinkling at first, but then turning into a real down pour. Shortly the tractors and wagons roared back into the yard, the men, wet and cold hurried in to change into dry clothes. “Where was Gramma,” they asked. “Still in the garden was the answer.” The men watched the family matriarch make no move to come in from the drenching rain, but remained focused and diligent.
Then, shamefaced, her dad said, “If she can stay out there and work in the rain, so can we", and without changing, they turned the tractors and wagons around and headed back to the field.
Shirley told me that she was sure that everyone in the whole family learned to be strong and overcome difficulties with perseverance, not so much from what Gramma said, but by the way she lived every day. |
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