Share your memories and advice from your grandparents here!

I think I want YOUR grandmas recipes!
 
I just remembered another funny about my grandmother. Remember "House of the Rising Sun" by The Animals? I used to play the piano when I would go to Mamaws and I once played and sang that song. I was shocked when Mamaw started singing along, and even knew a verse I hadn't heard before.. When I asked her how she knew that song, she just said, "Why honey, that song's almost as old as I am."
 
My grandma was a master gardener with a green thumb. We used to take our sick houseplants to her. Next time we would visit, she would have it all recuperated and usually had propogated more! I don't remember that she used much fertilizer or anything. She did compost leaves though and her last husband (and only one I knew) was a retired landscaper. They had a house in the San Fernando Valley. It had an amazing garden and at some point during each visit there, Grandma would take me out to her garden and show me the progress of all her plants. I realize I learned a lot of gardening by osmosis this way. She used to say things like "I moved this over here to be warmer by this wall" and discussed her pruning techniques even though I lived in an apartment. She always kept all the leaves raked up off the lawn, could not stand for them to be there. If she got behind her yearly schedule she was upset. Sometimes I would help her catch up as she grew more elderly. I spent a few years going out to her place once a week to help her and take her to the grocery store, especially after the last husband died.

I often wonder after they sold that house, if the people left her magical little garden. I like to picture that it is still there. She had a long awning spanning the length of the back of the house, with a cement slab and a round glass dining table out there. It was her favorite place to invite us to drink her homemade lemonade. She had a little old fridge out there, painted with house paint, and she had painted the cement slab an unlikely shade of green. She had hanging plants that were amazing and her garden smelled heavenly, with all the old fashioned old fragrant flowers that little old ladies planted back then. She was from Idaho and talked about missing her lilacs, which now that I live in the Pacific Northwest, they are one of my favorites too.

Yup, I have a lot of fine memories of Grandma.
 
Aren't these memories great? My grandmother had a green thumb also. I bought her a tiny Christmas Cactus one year and several years later when she passed, my aunt gave me a cutting. That cactus was huge and covered with hundreds of blooms.
 
My mom and I both caught the gardening bug from her, but I'm not so great with the veggies.

My mom likes asian style gardens, very minimalistic and low maintenance, so grandma's garden holds much more fond memories.
 
My Mom and her sister took Mamaw one day back to her homeplace in Wears Valley to visit her only living brother. He was handicapped but lived alone. His house was just a tumbledown cabin built by their father in the late 1800's. At the end of the back porch was a natural spring and Uncle Shirley had a bucket with a rope he used to pull up his water. Also on the end of another rope hanging down in the spring was a jar of buttermilk and another jar of butter.

He had cooked a pot of pinto beans and baked a pan of cornbread. That cold buttermilk and sweet butter along with the sweetest onions I've ever tasted completed the meal. I was probably only 8 or 9 years old but I've never forgotten that meal - fit for a king.
 
Well....my great grandparents were some piece of work. I'm 35 and my GGF died when I was 7 but I somewhat remember him. He always wore bibbed overalls. I can't ever remember him in anything else. He had names for all his cows and would call them from the field to milk originally by hand but later by machine twice a day. We had a small dairy barn....4 stalls and a milk room. We had one of the big stainless steel milk vat. It was really cool. I can remember playing in the hay loft in the barn as a child all day long.

GGM would let us look for eggs all over the farm, they would lay in machinery, under all kinds of stuff, in all kinds of places in the barn. It was like an easter egg hunt every day! She had a garden, grape arbors, cherry and pear trees, and she cooked on a wood stove until the day she died in 1992.

One of my funniest stories was when we came over for lunch and my granny (her daughter) told her "mama, you got a little something in your teeth...." Grandma TOOK HER TEETH OUT at the kitchen table and examined them, then proceeded to LICK THEM CLEAN. :sick

She also had a hearing aid and would turn it off all the time but you could bet that if you were talking about her in the next room in a whisper she darn well knew about it.

She loved her chickens....granny said she would sit outside and talk to the girls all day long if she could have. She also said that she could kill a mean old rooster with a rock with one shot. You didn't mess with her. :lol: She also loved to quilt. When she died we divided up all her quilts between her 5 children, 14 grandchildren, and 22 great grandchildren. We had to go around 3 times before they were all gone. That's over 100 quilts! She would sew and granny and GGF would cut out all the pieces.

Now my granny.....she is a riot! She is addicted to cookbooks, loves her convience foods, cooks waaaaay too much for any event, and has a paper towel addiction. She taught me how to clean my first chicken. She is my link to my GGM. She always tells us stories of "the old ways" when she was a child growing up on the farm.

Thought I would include a picture of my GGM....Lizzie Amos. This is a picture of her at Christmas sometime in the late 80s....to the left is her daughter Gail and to the right is her daughter Mary, my granny's sisters. She was a pistol!
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You folks are very very lucky. Three of my grandparents died long before I was born, and the fourth (my paternal grandmother) was a) utterly useless at any practical skills and b) an utter ironclad stone cold technical-term-for-female-dog whose main hobby was playing her children off against one another and complex backstabbing schemes, all I learned from her was that I would not have enjoyed living among the titled classes of medieval Italy (she would have fit *right* in with the Borgias and so forth).

However my parents are probably the age of many of y'all's grandparents :P (they were born in 1922 and 1926), and I learned a lot of great Depression-era woodworking-and-repurposing-of-objects things from my dad, and good Pennsylvania Dutch cooking and gardening from my mom.

But I'm still jealous of those with actual grandparents :P

Pat
 
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