Remembering Grandma Tietjen

Our paternal grandmother, Louise Tietjen, passed away this past winter of 2013 at the age of 87.  We were glad that we had a chance to see our grandparents when they made a trip to California a few months prior.  We used to go back east every summer to hang out at their house in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.  On our recent tour to the northeast we returned to Old Saybrook to spend time with our family and commemorate our grandmother.

Being at the old house brought back lots of memories of the time we spent there: playing in the garden with grandma and preparing salads with the fresh veggies; rustling through the old clothes in the attic for costumes for our very first plays and fashion shows that we put on for our family; flashlight tag in the dark with the neighborhood kids; fireflies; collecting seashells at the town beach; and walks around the North Cove, looking out at the Long Island Sound.

Another integral part of our summer trips was taking a drive to Amherst, Massachusetts where our dad was born and the family still owned a beautiful piece of land.

This past trip, we returned to the land and held a small ceremony with just the three of us sisters to commemorate our grandmother, Louise Tietjen. The last time we were at the family land, we were memorializing our uncle Richard who died in 2009 after a long battle with lymphoma. After Richard passed away, our family donated the land to the town of Amherst in his honor and named the portion that connects to the Robert Frost Trail “The Poet’s Walk.” We were thinking about him too as we performed our small ritual.

Below is one of Richard’s poems accompanied by an early photo of him with our father Ramsey on the Amherst land.

PORTRAIT OF 2 LATE HOLOCENE HUNTERS

Guilford — 2007

My brother and I stand, my bow with arrow nocked,
his bow tangled between his knees.
It looks like it’s made from a branch.
Mine is store-bought
but he has a cowboy hat.
Our arrows seem to be dowels
from my father’s basement workshop.

My brother, 2 years younger, makes no attempt to pose;
he gazes into the film with open, innocent eyes.
My eyes are narrowed, suspicious: a hunter.

Later, my mother whacked the bow across my legs
for shooting at the house.

Later, I went down to the basement
to make a machine gun from a two-by-four.
My father suggested we make it
into a destroyer instead.
He did all the work and gave it
swiveling gun turrets fore and aft
and poured lead into the hull to make it
float upright in the bathtub.

Much later, it seems most of my childhood
play was an imitation of war.

We dedicated our new album, “Kindred Lines,” to Grandma Louise Tietjen.
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