November 6, 2019

Many of us are fortunate enough to have had at least one beloved grandparent who enriched our lives. I knew all four of my grandparents. Although my Pop died when I was four, I had two grandmothers and one grandfather well into my twenties. I spent lots of time with them. My paternal grandparents grew crops, not animals, in rural South Carolina. My widowed maternal grandmother, was the Postmaster in a tiny South Carolina town.

Grandparents Are Precious

I loved spending time with my grandparents! Grandmama Elga weighed me on the postal scales, took me next door for an Icee and a toy from the Dime Store. when she wasn’t working at the Post the Post Office, we spent days at our family beach house walking along the shore and picking up seashells. Grandaddy Wilbur and Grandmama Lois, a little less cosmopolitan, lived in a 100 year old farmhouse her daddy built before she was born. She never left that house much. Once, she went to Hawaii (when my Uncle Freddie paid for his mom and dad to fly out and have a once in a lifetime vacation) and of course she went to church every Sunday. Fridays, she had a standing hair appointment after which she bought groceries, and shopped sales at Belk and JC Penney’s. She cooked three meals a day, always a meat and three, with produce from the garden behind their house, plowed by my granddaddy on his red tractor.

I Remember Every Wrinkle On Her Hands

She would take my cousins and me into the garden to help pick peas and beans. Our efforts produced bushels of produce she put into the sink, filled the sink with water and let us pick out the “trash” as it floated to the surface. She dumped the beans or peas into her big blue Tupperware bowl so we could shell them. I can remember her showing me how to pinch the hull on the seams until it popped open and how to scoop out the little green legumes. I could never shell as efficiently as she could. I would try a few and frustrated I’d move on. Despite memory not being my strongest attribute, I vividly remember the floral smock she wore, the blue Tupperware bowl, the bright green beans, and every wrinkle and bend and freckle of her sweet, old hands…