Family is such an important thing. We cherish them and love them. My Granny is no different. She went to be with the Lord yesterday. We knew it was coming, but distance made it hard to be there all the time. She had a brain tumor that was relentless. But what makes it all okay is that I know she is singing Glory to God in the Highest. For all of eternity. Forever. There are not enough words to describe her, but I'm going to try. I'm going to try because she was such an amazing person that I believe I want all of you to have a little bit of her. You can't meet her or talk to her, but I will try to show you a little of why she was just awesome in ever way. She may be one of the best women I know.
She lived in Virginia Beach and we lived in South Carolina. Ever since we were babies my parents would drive us up (now the trip only takes about 7 hours, but when we were little more like 9) and leave us with Granny and Noonie all summer. We did get homesick only a couple of times. It was hard not to love being at her house. When we would drive there all three of us (James, my older brother and Mark, my younger) would try to stay awake so we could 'help' Dad drive. We all fell asleep, until we got to a certain drawbridge about 15 minutes away from her house. I remember it because even to this day, I love driving over it - the sound that it makes when you drive over it is a sound you don't hear anywhere else in the world - unless you are doing exactly that. So, when we would hear that sound, we knew we were close and then we would all wake up and pretend that we had only been 'resting our eyes.'
When we got to her driveway we were usually all pumped up with adrenaline. Her house and land just had that effect on you. She had a long gravel driveway (we didn't appreciate it when we were younger but when we turned teenagers, we had to re-gravel that bad boy) and you had to drive slowly down it. Once you got to her gate you could hear their long-haired Dachshund start barking. Her name was GiGi. She was a mess. Her tail once a normal sleek tail and accidentally been dipped in paint when Noonie was painting and she was running all around and her hair was never the same since. She also bit you if she didn't like you. It took all summer, pretty much every summer to get to the point where GiGi liked you. Anyways, Granny and Noonie lived on the river and when we got out of the car in the dark we could smell the water. My Great-Grandaddy built the house. It is a 2 story house with a den added with a bedroom above the den. Her house was magical. Always something to eat in the kitchen. So, when we would pull up at 1 am, she would feed us. Macaroni salad, deli sandwiches, potato salad, baked beans, cornbread and then we would all eat a heaping bowl of ice cream and then try to get to sleep to be ready for the next day. The house had an attic - with very 70s wallpaper still up. The steps leading to the attic were unusually high and she made us crawl on hands and knees to get up there. We could play for hours. Old dolls that were my mom's, old wooden toys, purses, books - it wasn't so much the things we played with but the atmosphere. The ceiling slanted down on both sides, there was an old cow(?) skull hanging up on the wall, red carpet and brown square wallpaper, 2 beds, a banjo we weren't to touch and extra crawlspaces in the wall we were convinced led to other worlds or at least new undiscovered lands. The den was the main living space. Only ever warmed by a wood stove next to some built in bookshelves with hundreds of murder/mystery books - also my mom's yearbooks, we loved reading those and then asking her all about Steve or Scott... :). In the middle of the den was a swing. It was perfect. We would bang on the piano, swing inside and find crafts or games to play in her closet. Yahtzee was a big deal. TV wasn't watched a ton, but I do remember a summer where all we did was watch Baby's Day Out.
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| Her house and cement slab |
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| GiGi |
She had a couple acres of land. You would never know from the main road what was back there. The dock was a big summer hit. We would crab and fish. Only to find out that Granny was sure as heck not going to clean the fish for us - her philosophy, you catch, you clean it, you eat it. Didn't happen a lot. I don't think I ever did. I remember one summer when she was having problems with snakes. She liked to keep chickens in a coop and so she would always have eggs to eat, but also, she loved chickens (plates and bowls and serving dishes would have chickens on them). Anyways, I remember going to get eggs for her one morning only to find a black snake in the nest. Uhm, terrified for life. But, she had a plan to kill the snakes. She would find their holes in the ground and then dump lighter fluid down the hole and drop a match. Small kabooms. There was also a magic tree on her property. It had a hole just the right height for us kids to look into. She told us that the tree would always have a new gift for us when we came. And it did, sure enough we would check that little hole and we would find a blue stone or a button or a penny. She taught us to only ever play poker with pennies. But we learned with raisins. Also on her property there was a huge cement slab. This is where we spent the other 6 hours of the day when we weren't in the attic. It had a broken basketball goal on it. We turned it into Nascar, or a bank or just wrote all over it with chalk. We were free to do with our imagination, whatever we wanted. It was amazing. We learned how to ride bikes on that slab. We also had to pick up all the pine cones. Not a fun job at all. She would buy a kiddie pool and tie a rope through it so that we could drag it all over her property and pick up sticks and pine cones. She must have had 100 pine trees. We had to take a nap everyday. Only after the nap could we either go the beach or swim in their pool. We loved their pool. Just a circular outside the ground pool.
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| Chickens |
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| Giving Wilson some 'sugar' |
Each summer she would have a project for us. Most of the time it was some sort of chore, but every now and then we got to do something great. Something only Granny would think up and decide to spend the summer doing. I remember when she wanted us to paint the cows. She had flat plywood cutouts of cows that she wanted to put up against the marsh down by Great-Grandaddy's house, but we had to paint them. They stayed for years. Probably still there right now. I also painted a rug on her cement front porch. One of those crocheted different color ones. Granny was an artist (so is my mom) and I loved seeing her artwork. Mostly stills of fruit or a barn, but she was really good. Every year since we were 7 she would send us to Makemie Woods camp. A week-long Christian camp. We did all kinds of crazy things, rock climbing, whitewater rafting, rappelling, sleeping under the stars. We always stopped at Stuckeyes on the way home when it was over. She wanted us to try a pecan log. Never did. I remember the summer they drove us to Niagara Falls. They didn't just stop every time one of the kids had to pee. In order to teach us to 'go' when we did stop, she kept a 'pee-bucket' in the van. You NEVER wanted to be the person that had to use it, so, we never had to make unnecessary pee stops. It worked. We also never ate out. She would pack lunches for us. Sardine sandwiches. Kipper sandwiches. (No, I'm not making this up) Mayo and sardine sandwiches. Canned sardines mind you. We loved it.
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| The dock |
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| Granny on her front porch - see the painted rug? |
While these memories are more about the life of our summer, Granny the person was spectacular too. She had sayings and stories we would hear over and over again. She never said she would spank us, but rather that she would 'jerk a knot in our tail'. She tells the story of when I was only a few years old, we attended a wedding at her church; we got there late and had to sit in the back. When I saw the men in tuxedos I apparently burst out saying "Nanananana Nananananana Batman!" She would tell us a story of some family we had long ago (she was a genealogy buff, has written and published a couple books actually) and how someone sat in someone else's chair and whoever says ' Get out of that thar char, I was a sitting thar'. She had a wonderful southern accent. We hardly ever drove anywhere, never had to, but when we did we would get history lessons about the Indians and the Pioneers. Granny loved the Pioneers. When I got pregnant with Wilson and talked about how I might want some pain relief, she explained to me how strong the pioneer women were. They had babies and didn't get pain relief. She would tell us stories of pioneers and how the struggled and how it all ended up. I'm pretty sure everyday after Pocahontas came out she told us how Jamestown was nothing like the movie. She loved Westerns. And movies about dogs. Especially Lassie.
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| View from front porch |
She was an amazing woman. And of all the things I remember, one sticks out as my favorite. She read and recorded the Uncle Wiggly stories onto cassette tapes for us when we were little. We listened to them until we wore them out, ever night we would listen to them. The original tapes are long gone now, but the last time Thomas, Wilson and I visited her over the summer, she was strong enough to read and record into our laptop 3 of those stories so that Wilson can go to sleep listening to his Great-Granny's voice. She was wonderful with voices and such. It makes me cry thinking about it - Wilson won't ever know her, but he will get to hear her reading to him.
I love my Granny so much. This isn't even half of what I could tell you. But I hope that you see how great she was and how much she means to me. It's going to be hard to attend her memorial service. But I hope that I can play violin for her and continue on her legacy of being so full of life.
This Thanksgiving season I see a lot of people posting what they are thankful for. I love that idea. I'm thankful for my Granny. For the lessons she taught us, the fun times we had together, for giving me my first violin, for taking us to church and VBS every summer but most importantly, I'm thankful that God saved her and now she gets to sing and praise Him for all Eternity.
In Christ,
Julie
