Grandma Sarah

Grandma Sarah was a force in my grandmother’s life. My grandmother was a force in mine. There is a connection, a direct line between Sarah Bement Hicok and Thomas Parks Rasmussen. I know a lot about her. I remember as a young person looking at the bed, in the room where she died on 9 March 1926. I still have the red wool blanket she died under. My wife, Sally, and I said our private wedding vows under it on a frozen winter day on South Twin Lake outside Sally’s family cabin a mile from where I am currently sitting. I have the chest that Sarah refers to in her autobiography. It sits under a new coat of linseed oil in our bunkhouse. It had been abused (by my way of thinking) by my ex-wife who painted it grey without my knowledge or permission. I finally got the courage (via Sally) to strip it. It looked pretty rough, just like it did sitting on the walkway up from the garage to the south porch of the house where Sarah and Charlie Hicok lived with my grandmother Hazel Claire Parks as a girl whose father, Fred Parks had died; where my mother Alyce Claire Smith lived as a girl, and where I, as a boy with the middle name Parks felt like he belonged in 1960.

It sat there in this rough state on the porch of our bunkhouse for a month as I pondered what Sarah would want me to do with this 150 year old wooden chest. I opted for linseed oil which was my best guess what was on it originally.

The house is gone. Sarah and Charlie are long dead. Hazel Parks Smith died in 1981. My mother died in 2012. My father in 2016. Yet I remain attached to them via heirlooms like this chest that I did not screw up restoring to its original condition. Never beautiful but functional.