A Visit to Granny's House

     I grew up mostly in Tucson, Arizona, but once in a great while, our family would drive back east to visit my relatives in Virginia. We always stayed at Granny’s house outside Lynchburg. She lived in a two-story house on a curve on a paved country road that had enough traffic on it to make it hazardous to cross. I was always scared to death to cross the road to visit my cousins who lived about half a mile away down a curving dirt road.

     Granny’s house didn’t get electricity or indoor plumbing until the 1960’s, so I remember her cooking on a big iron wood stove and pumping cold, rusty water from an iron hand pump outside on the concrete slab on the screen-in back porch. She would pump the cold, rusty water into a bucket, and I would pour some it into a glass from a metal dipper. It wasn’t that rusty, just a little bit , because of the iron in the pipes. It tasted so good—not at all like our treated water today.

     The neighbor lady across the road had a huge apple tree and would send over a basketful of apples. Granny would sit down in the kitchen in the evening, take out her paring knife,peel the apples, and soak them in water. In the morning, she would dry them and fry them with butter and sugar. They tasted great. She would also fry some slices of cured Virginia ham, and serve it with red-eye gravy made from the drippings from the ham mixed with coffee. She also would make fantastic home-made biscuits which we would eat with butter and honey.

     She would take the strings off green beans (pole beans, she called them), and I would help her. We would break them into smaller pieces for her to boil on the stove. My mother always pressure cooked her green beans, so this was something new to me. One other thing that was new to me was what Granny called “Shuckie beans”. These were green beans that she had strung on thread and hung behind her gas stove to dry in the winter. They would turn brown. It took a lot of cooking to make them tender again, but cooked with salted pork fat, I thought they tasted out of this world. I wish I knew where to find some today.

     Another thing she liked to eat was corn bread, broken up in a glass with “sweet milk” (regular whole milk) poured on top. I liked corn bread like this too, but with buttermilk poured on top.

     We used to sit on her front porch next to the wooden railing and the wide front concrete steps lined with buckets and dishpans full of potted flowers and watch the world go by.
 

      When it came time to go back to Arizona, she would stand on the back porch with her kerchief in her hand, hiding her mouth and trying not to cry, and giving us a small wave good-bye. It made me cry every time.

     Well, I guess you can tell a lot of my memories are based on food. In fact, the last time I ever saw Granny was in 1980. I was expecting my oldest son. I had driven back to Virginia with my mother and we had driven down to Big Stone Gap where Granny was staying in a nursing home. As we were driving around, we stopped at a Long John Silver’s seafood place at Granny’s request. Her teeth were gone, but she managed to “gum” her helping of a fish dinner and hush puppies. She said she enjoyed it.

     She had lost three of her sons that year, my father and two of his brothers, and I guess she felt she had more people waiting on the other side than she had left here; so only a couple of months later, she passed away at the nursing home. I miss her. She was always kind to me.