Just a Spoon Full of Mayo

              On March 12th, 2011 my sweet little grandma...aka..."Nanny" died in Hattisburg Mississippi leaving behind three broken hearted daughters, a son, and a huge extended family tree of grand kids that loved her. She used to slice up fresh tomatoes from her own garden and lightly salt them for us and we were in heaven. She was a green bean snapping, ham glazing, butter bean buttering wonderful woman with a sassy country twist! I can't tell you the love I have for this sweet little lady. She hand stitched almost every competitive skating outfit I ever wore and saved us thousands of dollars by laboring over the sewing machine with shaky loving hands. One thing I loved about nanny was that I never knew what she was going to say. I remember being that selfish, fat little American kid that complained about not getting the latest video game or toy and then she would quietly stop me in my tracks by describing her Christmases as a little girl growing up in the Great Depression where she would get what as a present.......but an Orange. This was not a stocking stuffer folks but the big finally! When she described opening her "present" she said it tasted like "Candy from heaven!" She actually lived that story of walking however many miles to school in the snow and other such ridiculous hardships that this generation will never know. If me or my brother had ever gotten an orange for Christmas we would've had simultaneous heart attacks, protested in pure anger, and refused to go to school or finish our plates.

     One of the classic Fredna stories that's burned into my memory forever is the time when she was bitten by a snake  while walking in some tall country grass. This to me is the nightmare of all nightmares! She made it to the hospital only to get the news that she couldn't be treated by a doctor because she hadn't seen the snake that bit her. I would've lost it completely. The grandma I knew went back to the scene of the crime and fished around through the treacherous patch of grass with a long stick until she found the fucker that sunk it's nasty teeth into her ancle! She lifted it up while it thrashed around and whipped into a frenzy. She stared down her fear and did what had to be done to save her own life. My horrible fear of snakes (Ophidiophobia) would have paralyzed me from going back and the story wouldn't have had such a happy ending. I own the word coward as far as snakes are concerned. No retirement sunsets for Tdos. The granny I truly recall as being a psycho super hero used to have a secret she was sitting on. And then one day she let it slip that she used to kill cats with hammers in the Mississippi country side with the steady hand of a hit woman kitty serial killer! I know....I know what it sounds like and to render an explanation for the heinous act of drowning a burlap bag full of scared cats in the dark would be perfectly pointless.  But her description of the sheer number of feline orphans that would show up every day whining and belting out hungry screams out weighed their poor family's financial reality. They could hardly feed a family of six on one chicken much less thirty some odd mangy cats that multiplied like wild kudzu. Back in nanny's day there was no Nintendo WI or Nickelodeon channel to keep the kids occupied. Her childhood dolls were made from corn stalks and twine (pronounced twaaaaaaan) and they thrived on pure imagination alone to pass the time. At least that was free! It was a time when people would crowd around a scratchy radio to hear public service announcements to get some bearings on current world events. She's certainly been around long enough to watch each member of our immediate and extended family grow into adults and go out into all sorts of directions on our own. I'm really going to miss her. In fact I already did miss her living so far away all these years. But now it's so final and the card I have sitting on my shelf that I wrote her and never sent wont do her any good now. It can't bring her one more moment of comfort knowing that one of her grand kids was thinking about her....or not (thus the dust that's long settled on the Cavalier cartoon sticker gluing it together). I'm so grateful to be alive in a time of such technical conveniences like indoor bathrooms, the Internet, and cell phones but are we really any better off? Nanny never had a Facebook page nor was she updating her Twitter account on the progress of the butter beans in her garden. My mind wanders into the funniest places when I try to imagine what her daily status posts would be like. "Them maters have u' cuple a' mower days till their ready for u'pluckin!" My mind is full of memories of trips to Cades Cove in the ol' silver mini van and our fine dining picnics on ham salad, chicken salad, and egg salad sandwiches on cool white bread that she would whip up like Macgyver in the woods. We would stuff our faces while we bounced from rock to rock over the freezing mountain water, somehow surprised every time at how cold it was. It was child's play all to the delight of our grandmamma matriarch that would sit on the Tennessee Smokie mountain river bank, watching us act like fools, while she ate mayonnaise with a fucking spoon! She kept our hearts and bellies full while beaming proudly from the side lines. My nanny will forever be floating around in the outskirts of my mind pilling more and more food onto my emotional plate and mending my torn clothes with a professional tailor's special touch. Her simple and kind approach to life gives us all a reason to take pause and remember her sincere thoughtfulness for others like the the sweet little old lady miss Pope she cared for in her free time back in Sevier County. She was pure human southern goodness and I wasn't there to give her that one last squeeze like I'd hoped. But I bet nanny's final words to me would've probably been something along the lines of "Now you stay out of trouble Mr!" or most definitely "GO VOLS"!