Grandma Becky
My paternal grandmother was named Phyllis Rebecca. She was born Oct 9, 1922, and went by Becky. I always loved that our birthdays were close together and we shared an opal birthstone. She was a petite woman with dark eyes and hair, a pistol by anyone’s standards, best I can tell. When I was a little girl, she and Papa lived in the same ‘holler’ they’d grown up in and built a little two-bedroom house with a sun porch and car port. They had a big garden on the hill, and a strawberry patch in an elevated bed by the back door. She hung her clothes out on the line and made sun tea in the summer. She saved cool whip containers instead of Tupperware and dirtied every dish in the kitchen making dinner. True to her generation, she quilted beautiful pieces and had enough canned fruits and vegetables in the basement to get us through the apocalypse.
By the time I came along her summer uniform consisted of pastel colored pedal pushers with Keds. I would spend a week with them every summer, and we would go for long walks in the evenings and play in the creek in front of the house. Sometimes I would go with her to church for choir practice or Ladies’ Aid meetings and run around the maze of hallways in the church my dad grew up in, looking for the names of great aunts, uncles, and cousins on the nursery wall and classroom rosters. Or I would play around on the stage of the fellowship hall running through curtains and secret doors, just like the kids at New Providence do today. I can almost smell the place; every church has a scent of its own and Green Hill was no different. I guess the family church was just an extension of their house to me, and the whole neighborhood felt like ours because both homeplaces were still standing nearby. When you’re seven or eight years old the willow tree and the water skates seem like magic.
Sometimes I wish for that simpler time. When smells were more intense, colors more vibrant, and time seemed slower and stretched longer, filled with only the best God had to offer—fireflies, peaches, and snapbeans by the bushel.
How, I wonder, do we harness more of that today?