Half a Piece Mabel

Grandma Strait’s name was Mabel, but in the family she was known as “Half a Piece Mabel.”

Whenever dessert was passed around at family dinners, she would smile politely and ask for “just half a piece.”

Half a piece of pie.

Half a piece of cake.

Always half.

The nickname became part of family lore, told affectionately for years afterward, though I suspect now it said something larger about the generation she came from. Women who learned early not to take too much. Not too much food. Not too much space. Not too much attention. Women who stretched meals, stretched money, stretched themselves.

Mabel raised five children, four girls and one boy, and theirs was an unusually close family. They gathered often at Grammax and Grandpa Jesse’s place for potluck dinners, the kind where every woman arrived carrying bowls covered in foil and everyone somehow knew exactly where to set things down without asking.

There were always conversations happening in layers.

Coffee being poured.

Children running through the house.

Laughter from the kitchen.

Somebody carrying in another folding chair.

Family, in those days, seemed less scheduled than rooted.

Mabel had married Jake Strait, who was a twin. They lived and farmed on the Strait family farm for years, building a life there together until family circumstances forced the sale of the farm. Not long afterward, Jake was killed in a farming accident that devastated the entire family and left Mabel without security or income.

After that, she never really had a home of her own again.

For the rest of her life, she lived with different townspeople and helped care for their homes and their meals. She moved quietly through other people’s households, useful in all the ways women of that generation knew how to be useful.

Cooking.

Cleaning.

Helping.

Caring.

I remember her hands most clearly.

They were soft and arm and covered with age spots. They looked exactly like what they were: the hands of a woman who had spent her entire life making food for people she loved.

She made homemade bread that filled the whole house with warmth. Sometimes cinnamon rolls too, sweet and soft and impossibly good in the way that only grandmothers’ cinnamon rolls ever are.

But my clearest memory of her happened upstairs in the attic bedroom at Grammax’s farm.

Sometimes when she came to stay, she would sleep upstairs with me.

The attic felt enormous at night when I was little. Slanted ceilings. Darkness gathered in the corners. The quiet sounds of an old farmhouse settling after everyone had gone to bed.

I remember lying there beside her after the lights were turned off.

Then I would feel her reach over and take my hand in the darkness.

And she would say softly,

“Well. Now we’re all the same color.”

Even now, I can feel the comfort of that moment.

The warmth of her hand.

The sound of her voice in the dark.

The gentleness of a woman who had lost almost everything and somehow still carried tenderness with her wherever she went.