I grew up in the town where my ancestors settled in 1875. By the time I was 18, my two older sisters and maternal grandmother lived on the same block we grew up on. I can't count the times someone has asked me, "How does your family live so close together?" That's easy; we're all too busy to get in each other's way.
MamMaw moved two houses down when I was in my teens. I remember many late nights talking with her and listening to her tell stories about the family. She had an old trunk that had belonged to her mother , and there were all kinds of treasures inside. There was a boxed brush and comb set, her and Grandpa's marriage license, a child's depression glass cup and saucer that she got on the church Christmas tree when she was a little girl, old letters, receipts, photographs, etc. I loved looking through the items she kept inside. I remember one time that she couldn't find the key, and even as I told her - begged her actually - not to break the lock, she grabbed a screwdriver and broke it open. She was extremely headstrong.
She would sit for hours and tell me how she and her cousin Ida slipped off to see my Grandpa off at the train station near the end of World War I. Just before he was to board the train, they got word the war was over. She talked about going to taffy-pulls, getting out of sight of home, and taking her shoes off to walk to school.
One of my favorite stories was about her dropping a "dead" wasp down the back of a girl's high-top boot at school one day. The girl was sitting so that her boot tops were away from her leg, and when she straightened up, the wasp stung her, and the fight was on.
MamMaw loved to watch Saturday Night Wrestling, and many weekends, I would walk down to her house, and we'd drink Coca-Cola out of little glass bottles and watch the Von Erichs.
She was contrary, to say the least. I asked her sisters once if my Grandpa dying when she was only 27 and leaving her with two small daughters had made her the way she was, perpetually unhappy. They responded with a resounding "NO, she was always that way; no one ever understood what your Grandpa saw in her because he was such a sweet man." I had to laugh; you can't argue with the truth.
As cantankerous and contrary as she could be, she could turn right around and be the kindest, most thoughtful person ever. I didn't like peanuts until a few years ago, and every year when she made peanut brittle, she would pour some of the candy out with no nuts, just for me. She knew how much I loved peach cobbler with lots of crust and no peaches, just juice; she had a small pan that she would fix me cobbler in, just how I liked it.
I'm thankful for the time I got to spend with her, for the visits to cemeteries, and the hours of talking about the family. I'm grateful that she never kept secrets about our family's history. She told me that I needed to know everything about our family, even the skeletons. She told me "secrets" that she made me swear not to reveal until everyone involved had passed, but she made sure that they were preserved and handed down so that they weren't lost with time.
I'm thankful for the time I got to spend "Close Up," just the two of us, talking until the wee hours of the morning, for her always having orange juice in a glass carafe in her refrigerator, for knowing what "faunching at the bit" means, for being fortunate enough to have inherited many of the treasures that were in her trunk, for her fruitcake recipe and "gut gravy" aka giblet gravy, and for the mental picture she painted of "having a runaway" when she decided to spray whiskey up her nose to cure a sinus infection.
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