My mother’s mother was extra special to me. She was my transplanted grandmother who had lived and grown up on the farm. She married the music director in her church and had two children: my uncle and my mother. When my mother was in her mid-twenties, Grandmother lost her husband to a stroke.
After being widowed, she continued her work in a textile mill like the one that she worked in as a child of eight years of age. She didn’t retire until she was in her sixties or seventies.
Grandmother loved her home and had some very nice furniture and treasures to decorate it. In her back and side yard she had lots of flowers in her flower garden (pansies, violets, irises, a pecan tree with a swing under it. In the front yard was a gorgeous magnolia tree.
In her home there was a guest bedroom with a canopy bed, high chest of drawers, a huge table for our families to eat at on the holidays. She loved to cook for the holidays and have her family there together. She loved her country cooking especially for her family.
I remembered how she loved to cook country biscuits and gravy. If she had guests she cooked and served lots of food to our families. The huge table was quite large and oval shaped so two families could eat together.
So when I was about five or six years old, I spent the night with her because my mother had another child, my sister, who was sick, so I got to spend the night with Grandmother. One late afternoon I found her navy blue, velvety bathrobe on her bed. It was a little chilly so I got under it on her bed. It was so luxurious and warm. I thought to myself, “Surely this robe is warm enough to keep me warm at the North Pole!” I remember still the warmth of her bathrobe.
On that cold evening and most of winter, she had a fire in the fireplace. We actually roasted chestnuts and popped popcorn in a metal basket over the fire in the fireplace. She always had a canary or parakeet that would sing to her or jump onto her finger. I enjoyed my visits with her.
Years later, my country grandmother hired a man to fix her porch. A friend had recommended him to her to fix the porch light. Well, the man turned out to be a farmer, whose wife had died about four years before. Eugene King, was his name. They started courting and thinking about their potential future with each other.
It wasn’t long before he showed Grandmother his twenty acre farm. Grandmother had loved farm life as a child. Papa King was a sweet, tall, skinny man who fell in love with our Grandmother. His wife had died four years before.
He had missed his first wife terribly. He said that he would plow the fields with his mule, Maude. After turning the mule loose from the plow, he led the mule into the barn. He would come in the house and fall asleep in a chair, lonesome and tired. He had eaten poorly since his first wife had passed away and so he was thin and tall. But he loved his farm.
After Grandmother visited his farm, Papa King and she began “courting.” He proposed to her and they married when I was about twelve. But before she agreed to marry him, she made him promise two things: the fireplace chimney was crumbling and needed fixing, she asked him to have it fixed. Papa King was more than willing to keep his promises.
With the second promise about Papa King’s habit of chewing tobacco and spitting it on the hearth, she made him promise to spit in a coffee can. He was so happy to marry Grandmother that he fulfilled both promises faithfully.
They were so happy together for so long. The farm had pecan and cherry trees, cats and dogs running around, a strawberry patch, and twenty acres of corn for food and for the mule. They lived happily together for about ten years.
Papa King was so happy to have a wife after all the years together. But he died of cancer. Grandmother kept up with the farm getting eggs from the chickens, strawberries from the strawberry oatch, and he had three peacocks, one was a male and the other were two peahens. She loved the farm and his grandsons helped her. Grandmother was a sweet Christian lady and I loved her very much and miss her.
