The Laundry Emily was a new arrival to the small North Dakota hamlet of Osnabrock. She had arrived in April 1921 after marrying the local postmaster and newspaper publisher, a widower named William. She came from New Jersey with her daughter Anna Mae after a failed marriage in Virginia. William had three children of his own; Ella, David, and Annie. Together the 6 of them became a family in their modest home on Broadway. William an immigrant from Canada of Scottish ancestry and Emily an immigrant from England were a minority in a community of many German and Scandinavian immigrants. One day while doing laundry at the community water well in the town center Emily could hear several women gossiping about her in German. Maybe it was the fact she was an outsider. Maybe because she was English but none the less they were gossiping about her. She listened quietly. One day she had had enough of their gossiping and rumor mongering. She turned to those bitties and told them off in fluent German what she thought of them and their gossip. The women were taken back by her talking to them in German. Never again did they gossip about her in their native tongues. The ladies never knew that when Emily came to America on a cold December day in 1894 her widowed father had remarried to a woman named Josephine. Josephine herself was an immigrant from Germany. She had taught Emily the German language when she was a young girl living in Newark. Those lessons served her well. According to the woman who witnessed this as a young girl and later told it to me in 1998 the ladies never again bothered Emily. Emily was my paternal grandma.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 01:41:34 +0000
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