Ribbons for the Jam

Anna Mary Robertson Moses had been a hired girl at twelve, a farmwife at twenty-seven, and a widow at sixty-six. Around 1932 she took up worsted-yarn embroidery. By seventy-six the arthritis had thickened her hands past needlework, and her sister Celestia suggested she try painting.

She did. On a sheet of Masonite laid flat on the kitchen table, sitting in a battered swivel chair perched on two pillows, she started every canvas with a coat of flat white house paint and worked top-down: sky, hills, trees, houses, cattle, people. For snow she shook glitter onto wet paint from a shaker, the way she'd sugar a cookie.

At the Cambridge Country Fair she entered her paintings alongside her jams and preserved fruits. She won ribbons for the jam. It was, presumably, good jam.

In November 1940 Gimbels brought her to New York for the Thanksgiving debut, fifty canvases on the wall. She was walked to a microphone and asked to say a few words about her paintings.

She delivered a forthright public address on her preserves.

She lived to a hundred and one. She took tea with Truman, sat for Norman Rockwell, and had her hundredth birthday declared Grandma Moses Day.

"Painting's not important," she said. "The important thing is to keep busy."