The granny who mooned the horses

One unforgettable woman with her own rules.

My father turns 80 on Saturday – which also happens to be Finland’s Independence Day. I’m not sure what that coincidence means, if anything, but today feels like the right day to celebrate a man who’s a storyteller to the bone. We’re giving him a book of the childhood tales he’s written over the years as a surprise present. Here’s one of them I want to share with you.

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The granny who mooned the horses

“Well of course. There she comes again with a full load. Couldn’t she have stuffed even more onto that burden of hers?” There’s irritation and admiration in my father’s voice. From the window you can see a bundle of chopped branch-wood swaying in every direction on the rise along the path from the cowshed. Finally the bundle lurches forward and collapses in a heap in front of the steps.

It’s Elli-muori bringing a load of firewood from the forest.

According to Elli-muori’s principles, firewood is not fetched from the wood shed in summer – firewood is fetched from the forest, which is full of sticks and twigs. The firewood shed is for winter. Father has forbidden Elli-muori from going into the forest many times, but she never listens.

Elli-muori is my grandmother, my mother’s mother. There are two reasons for father’s ban. Elli-muori is over 80 years old, and her eyesight is very poor. The fear is that she might get lost in the forest. We children have also been ordered to keep an eye on her movements, though she has never once gotten lost. She has always managed to find her way back. She’s sly – hides an axe and the rope for bundling firewood under her apron and heads off to fetch wood. In the same way she carries a berry pail under her apron when she goes bilberry picking. We wondered how she could possibly see the berries, but somehow they seemed to be found by feel. And we had to believe it, since she did bring home berries for the pudding.

Elli-muori had come to live with us for the summer. She was a tiny, carefree granny who said she was “Elli-muori,” and that’s the name she was called. She took father’s and mother’s restrictions on her movements with good humour, but she certainly didn’t follow them. She often slipped away to the forest to collect brushwood.

It was hard for me to believe that this little granny had given birth to 16 children, and that she had been one of the most famous moonshine distillers in the municipality. Elli-muori had at least once been caught distilling, and had received a prison sentence. I never quite learned how long the sentence was, but she had spent a few weeks in jail, with my Aunt Mimmi, then a nursing infant, along with her. She hadn’t had to sit out the entire sentence because of the small child; the rest of the sentence was served by her husband, my grandfather Olli. I never met Olli – he died before I was born.

My father had actually become acquainted with his future mother-in-law through her “products” long before he met his future wife. As a young man, during breaks between logging seasons and river drives, father had lodged in the same village. In those days, people held moonshine-laced parties rather often, and father had participated in them with great enthusiasm.

Perhaps there had been something wrong with the drinks, or perhaps he had just been in a foul mood, but one All Saints’ Eve father had wanted to continue the festivities in another village. The journey, however, ended at the gate of the lane. There had been a gatekeeper – either the devil himself or someone else invisible to others.

A fight had broken out. Father had sworn and beaten his imaginary opponent with fence rails so hard that they snapped. Whether it did any good or whether father was getting the worst of it, because he then fetched a manure fork from the cowshed and continued the battle with that. No one knows how the match ended – who won or if it was a draw. Father never got past the gate to the next village. It must have been a strange sight for those who witnessed it.

Neither father nor Elli-muori ever spoke of those old matters. I once tried to ask father what the opponent had looked like, but his face went red, his hand scratched the back of his neck, and he turned to look out the window. Whether he didn’t remember or didn’t want to remember. He probably lost. Father stopped drinking once his bachelor days were over.

There was one thing Elli-muori simply could not believe or understand. She had received a letter saying the state would begin paying her a national pension. How could the state possibly have enough money to be giving it out to people for nothing in return? At that rate, the state would run out of money – go bankrupt, surely.

She had a paper stating that she could withdraw a certain sum of money from the post office. So, when my father had business in the village, Elli-muori wrote an authorisation so he could draw the first instalment of her pension. With that money father had bought a quarter-kilo package of coffee and a small amount of gingerbread biscuits.

It was haymaking time, and our whole crew had been working all day on the field. Only Elli-muori stayed home to mind the house. In the evening, when we came home, we asked how things had gone for the house-sitter. She said she had passed the time by drinking the state-paid coffee. Mother looked into the cupboard and shook her head: “Did you drink a whole package of coffee in one day?” Yes, apparently she had brewed it all since she had, for once, gotten beans paid by the state. Mother later told us that half a jug of cream had gone into that coffee as well.

The day hadn’t been only coffee-drinking, though. A herd of horses that grazed freely around the village had come up to the fence and started pressing the fence rails with their necks. Out she went, shouted, “Off with you to hell!” and lifted her skirt and mooned them. The horses were too embarrassed to look and galloped away.

Elli-muori didn’t wear underpants, and the coffee day didn’t make her sick. She just sighed, “It’s a fine and carefree life when there’s food and warmth.”

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Unfortunately, my great-grandmother Elli died long before I was born, so I never got to meet her. I think we would’ve enjoyed each other’s company at the coffee table.

Until next time,

Elina