grandma

Grandma was a hard-working dutch-Irish woman from deep in the Appalachain.  She was no nonsense, with a warm smile and laugh.  She was about five feet tall, and though she cleaned her house and tended her garden tirelessly, she had the softest pillowy hands I have ever known.  Her voice was high, but not annoyingly so; a good country soprano, though she could not carry a tune in a bucket.  She would stand on the front porch and call us for supper, "Aaaauuuuuubreh!  Weeeeeeeendeh!  Come git yer supper!!"  And inevitably she would add, "And fetch yer Grandpa!" 

She cooked simple food... amazingly.  Mostly, supper would consist of home-grown canned and fresh produce: green beans, black-eye peas, butter beans, real cornbread in an iron skillet that steamed when she flopped it out onto the plate, beef stew, chicken pot pie for to die, salmon patties with Alaskan salmon caught by Grandpa or Uncle Donnie, whole milk, made from scratch biscuits (usually left over from breakfast), honey from Grandpa's bees out back, home made grape juice from the vines next to the old smokehouse, corn on the cob from the field, and almost always buttermilk to crumble your cornbread into and eat with a spoon.  Grandpa loved his cornbread and buttermilk.  And no one was allowed to sit down at the table before removing caps from heads and washing hands.  Turnip greens, cabbage with chunks of ham or bacon, sometimes whatever fish we had caught fishing with Grandpa.

Then there was dessert!  Pies:  apple, peach cobbler, blueberry, blackberry with berries we had picked in the fields.  Cakes:  walnut, chocolate, vanilla-chocolate swirl, almost always baked in a bunt.  There was always something sitting around for snacking.  If one cake was almost gone, there was a pie cooling, waiting to be consumed.

She was a gentle soul, Grandma.  She prayed every night before "turnin' in."  I remember hearing her pray sometimes.  She got us all and then some.  But she could handle two "rowdy youngins" or a house full of grandkids with ease and authority.  We talked alot about life.  Her phrase, "Well, Aubrey, that's just life..."  is forever etched in my mind and comes back to this day, and often.  She would let me cry when I was missing my "Daddy Gene," or Mom, who was late coming home.  But if one of us pushed her past her limit, off went her shoe, and WHACK!!  She also kept a switch handy, and if she was without one, in a pinch the fly swatter did the job.  If she broke a switch on us, we had to retrieve one from the willow or hickory.  

She loved going to church.  She just loved the Lord, and loved the people who loved the Lord.  She was there anytime the doors were open at that old red brick church with what seemed like a hundred stairs in the front to the door; China Grove Church of God.  She would sit on about the sixth pew from the front in the middle section on the left hand side next to Grandpa, who usually just cried through the whole service.  The singing was always so jubilant, and Grandma, who couldn't sing, couldn't clap on beat, either!!!  Wendy and I would get so tickled watching her try to hit the beat.  And when she got really happy in the Holy Ghost, she'd let out a "WhoooooOOOOOO!   Whoop!  Whoop!" and move her head up and down, and move her arms back and forth, all the while spinning in a circle in perfect time!  That's how I knew the Holy Ghost was for real.  If you got too close, you might get pegged by one of her bobby pins!! 

But I could never help getting too close.  Sometimes, I wish I could have gotten close enough that more of her would have rubbed off on me.