This is one of my two favorite grandmothers. She lived all her life in south Texas, where she taught me to play Spite 'N Malice and Canasta, and taught me to make candy: toffee, divinity, fudge, pralines. She taught me that fresh strawberries were extra good if you held them by their green tops and dipped them in a bowl of sugar before you ate them, and that I shouldn't watch soap operas, even though she did. Her Sunday-after-church dinners were a southern feast: ham and okra gumbo, black-eyed peas, mustard greens, cornbread and the best cobbler I've ever eaten, made from wild, thorny Texas dewberries.
Besides cooking, she liked to sit and visit. As a child, I would lie after supper on her thick living room carpet, eyes closed and ears open, listening to stories that bobbed and rebounded through the air above me. Avoiding bedtime banishment, I pretended to be asleep until I actually was asleep, wrapped in the comfortable conversation of aunts and great aunts and adult cousins who knew and loved each other well.
My grandmother was born in October of 1910. October the tenth --- 10-10-10. The rhythm of her birthday numbers underscored what I already knew: she was one-of-a-kind and very special. Through her, 10-10-10 leapt out of the history books and became real--playing cards and eating cobbler with me in my very present daily existence.
Decades later, I still think of my grandmother every time the month and date and year align, and even when they almost align, as they did twice last week. The time I spent with that 10-10-10 grandmother seems not so far away, and yet I can almost touch the next 10-10-10.....October 10, 2010.
How can a century be so short?
2 comments:
I am only 16, but already, I know how you feel. A century is surely one of the shortest things known to mankind.
Loved this post, Alice. You have quite a heritage. The Sunday dinner description made John and I drool, and he about died when you mentioned the dewberry cobbler--he LOVES dewberries!
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