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It's spring, and my grandma is laughing at me. My maternal grandmother was a Georgia cracker, a gen-yoo-wine rural Southerner. She loved gardening, birds, and kids, so she was a terrific grandma. She was also the proverbial steel magnolia. My grandpa, a DC cop, died of a heart attack eight months before my mom was born. At the time of her widowing, my granny became the head of a household that included two small children and one in the oven, her mom, her mother-in-law, and her shiftless no-'count brother. She went to work as a secretary for the railroad, and stayed at work for thirty years. She was a cheerful, merry, silly soul, despite her hard life. My grandma's influence wasn't really obvious to me until recently, when my friends began to acquire homes. One such friend bought an old house in Richmond. This pal of mine is a highly intelligent woman with a master's degree in poetry, but she don't know jack doodley about plants and birds. She, and my other friends (excluding Jeremy the Botany Bear, who can recite Latin names of plants, fer gossakes) seem surprised when they point to a tree, or plant, or bird, and I know what it is. I'm usually surprised, too. I know them from years of hearing my granny do color commentary on every car trip we took together. "Looky at the forsythia...and those redbud trees, mmm hmm...now, that azalea bed is too far out in the sun, they like some shade under the pines...naw, that's a white pine there, see how it branches out closer to the ground? And thisere, this is a violet, you gotta dig that outta the lawn or it'll take over...listen at that! That's a redbird. Must be a nest over yonder...." I never realized that my grandma was teaching me to love and value the natural world, or that she was giving me the tools to describe my surroundings. I only knew that we were sharing time together, and I would listen diligently to her because I loved her so. She also taught me to sew and embroider, but her attempts to teach me crochet never took. Maybe I'll try again, in her memory. My hands, like my mom's and my brother's, look like my granny's. I hope mine can do as many wonderful things as hers did. Now reading: Midnight for Charlie Bone by Jenny Nimmo. Something to read while waiting for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; not an imitation, but similar in tone. Got it at the book fair, and I'm hooked. On the Headbone: the Banana Splits theme song...they are, for reasons unknown, on the telly tonight. |
 
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Granny T