and Sprinkles on Top

Foggy Morning Memories

Posted on 29. Jan, 2009 by Deb in The Girl

With the foggy conditions here this morning, I thought it wise that kid and I leave early for school.  I haven’t talked about it here, but at semester change, I worked with the counselors and the principals to transfer her to a different campus.  The whys and and benefits and negatives are neither here nor there at the moment, but the location of the campus is – it’s in the building where I went to elementary school – and in the neighborhood where I first lived.  Instead of being 2 miles from home, this campus is about 12.

We got there early – too early for me to actually drop her off, so we went East by one street and I showed her where my Granny had lived when I was a little girl.  My Granny was my dad’s mother.  She and my mother didn’t get along and I was not the favorite grandchild, but I know that she loved me and I loved to visit.  My Aunt Dot’s kiddos were the favorite grandchildren.  I don’t know, now looking back, if I sensed something, or if it was because my mother complained about how Granny favored Dot’s kids.  My mother insists that it was because Pop Pop, who died long before I was born, loudly exclaimed that my Aunt Dot’s daughter was the ugliest baby he had ever seen whereas my older sister was the apple of his eye.

I wonder now if it was true, because looking back, it never really showed.  Going to Granny’s was always fun.  And she always loved me.

She lived close enough, that I could take my bike.   She made the best grape and plum jellies, and there was never store bought jelly at her house.  We always had pickles, too, which she made as well.  Sweet and crispy bread and butter pickles as well as tart and tasty sunshine dill pickles.  Oh,  and the very best Sweet Tea in the whole world.  My memories of spending time with her are mixed in outside play with my cousins, Lawrence Welk on Saturday nights, lots of laughter, shelling peas and amazing food.  Even as a little girl, I guess I was food driven.  Somewhere around here I have her homemade fudge recipe.  Maybe I should dig that out this weekend.

She had two living sisters that lived close enough for us to visit, and their husbands were living.  Having older uncles the age that grandpa’s are supposed to be was a great novelty to me because neither of my grandfathers were living.  She was Louise.  Here sisters were Tena and Bertha.  We are southern, so they were “AINT TEENER” and “AINT BER”.  Aunt Tena’s husband was Uncle Will and he had a farm outside of town.  It was from their farm that the cucumbers and peas and okra came from.  Going out there meant playing in the barn and in the hay.  Aunt Ber was married to Uncle Cecil.  They lived in Ft. Worth, which to a girl from Mansfield, Texas, in the early 1970′s was the big city.  Uncle Cecil played the piano and Aunt Ber made cherry jelly, and a visit there meant going home with a small jar.  Cherry jelly was even better than grape or plum, maybe because it was so rare.

Sometimes, I think as we age, so many recent memories and stresses crowd out our brains and we forget what it was like when we were little.   So, when you are my age – middle aged, I guess is what it would be considered – our to do’s crowd those to the back of our brains.   But then, there is a trigger that brings both traces of memories that are lacking in the details.  And then there are the triggers that bring floods of memories so detailed that we can hear them, and smell them.  And taste them.

I didn’t expect such strong memories this morning.  But chance had it that we had a few extra minutes in a life that is usually running at full force, and the few minutes it took to drive down Hamil Street triggered ‘em.

Tags: Childhood, Families, Grandparents, Memories, Parenting