The Knacks

One of my earliest memories of her is one time when I was sitting in her lap, in the platform rocker in the living room. I don’t know now why she was holding me, but I do remember how contented I felt. Another time, she gave me a baby bottle of milk to drink while I curled up on the couch. I knew I was way too old for that, and she told me so, but I wanted it and she got it for me. I suspect that it was the last time I willingly drank milk, as I just cannot get it to go down anymore. And there were countless times that I “fell asleep” while the adults were sitting around talking, so that I got carried into the front bedroom and changed into a tee-shirt nightie to sleep for the night. I was afraid of the dark, so she always turned on a small light to chase away the shadows created by the trees at the window. Ah yes, I remember those times.

As I got older, we spent more time together, especially when I didn’t have school in the summer. If I got bored, she would cut out, sew and stuff a rag doll for me. She would trace the paper pattern she had cut from a brown grocery bag, and create clothes for it to wear. There was leftover yarn for hair, even if the color was a bit strange and the hairline odd. All of them got stitched up on an old Singer treadle machine, and eventually I got to use that machine myself. Sometimes we cooked, sometimes she let me help her clean the sink in the bathroom (well, I thought I was helping anyway) and occasionally she would let me help her wrap presents if there was an occasion for gifts. I held the ribbon so that she could tie the knot. If one can learn creativity, then I learned that from her. When I goofed something up, she would just laugh with me and we would try again another time.

If she was depressed, or maybe just bored, Poppaw would tell her to go to town and buy a new hat. I loved going along for that! She never learned to drive a car well enough to get a license, so she would call a taxi to take us to town. She would sit on a bench in front of a vanity table in the hat department while clerks brought over hats for her to try on. Her head would turn one way and then another to see every view in the mirror. The chosen hat would be placed in a sturdy cardboard hatbox for the trip home. We usually stopped in the dime store to buy candy and roasted nuts from the candy clerk, and took our coconut bonbons and cashews home to eat. I can’t ever remember her telling me no if I asked for a small toy or some candy. My grandchildren would have to say that I do tell them no sometimes.

I thought I was just having fun. She thought she was just being a loving grandmother. In reality, she was teaching me life lessons. I know that now, especially as I spend time with my own grandchildren. Grandchildren are different from your own children. They aren’t loved more than your own kids; they are loved differently, perhaps more patiently. She spent hours and hours with me, understanding that it was not easy to be an only child without siblings to play or fight with. By the time Phoebe was born, I was a young woman, and I didn’t need the same amount of attention. But I always knew she loved me and would always be there for me.

Nannie and I had fond memories of a very long trip, a Fleenor family vacation, one July. Pop-paw drove, Nannie rode in the middle of the front seat beside him, and Woody “rode shotgun” beside of her at the window. Woody drove a lot of that trip, but Nannie always sat in the middle, and I had the whole back seat to myself. We left Kingsport and drove all the way up to Toronto, Niagara Falls, Detroit, Des Moines, Branson and then on home. It was thousands of miles and weeks of time, and was a real adventure. We laughed a lot of the way. We slept in a “dog bed” in Toronto, as she called it, because a convention had all the hotels full and we ended up in an older motel with a futon style couch. Even then we laughed about it, maybe to keep from crying. Outside of Des Moines, on the way to her cousin’s huge Angus farm, we stayed at a place where the owner looked at the Lincoln we were traveling in and upped the price on the room we got! Close to there at Jules Danish Farm, I drank about a gallon of water so Woody could pour some of his beer into my glass, and she used to tease me about that, too, because Woody finally poured my water into a plastic plant beside the table. It was almost as funny as her “pea pie” when she ate the apples out of the tough crust and then filled the crust with the bland peas left on her dinner plate.

I could go on for hours, and I know that we all have our own memories. I just wanted to share some of mine.

A couple of years ago when I stayed with Nannie and Woody in Florida for two weeks, I tried to remind Nannie of some of these things. She remembered the “dog bed”, but not everything that I mentioned. I asked her to repeat some of the old timey stories she used to tell about growing up, but most of those seemed to be gone. She did share some things I had not known, and maybe you didn’t know either.

She told me that Grandmaw Roller made the communion wine for their church, and they had communion every Sunday. If the weather kept them from going to church, they had scripture at home and a taste of the wine. I knew that Nannie had played a fiddle, which I hope Phoebe has, and I had forgotten that Grandmaw sang hymns all the time. (Bringing in the Sheaves when the sheets were brought in off the line, just for fun.) Guess I did come from a religious family and never thought about it that way. I knew that we are to never do laundry on January 6th, as that was Old Christmas, so I observe that for Grandmaw and now for Nannie.

Nannie talked about her one-room school and the schoolmaster who was sweet on her. I had heard his name before, but never as a teacher or as a boyfriend. She laughed about the young men sneaking up to the house at night to try to lure her and her sisters outside, but her daddy ran them off with his shotgun. It was a hard life on the hillside farm in East Tennessee, but they made the most of everything, from “lumps” of maple sugar candy in early spring to fresh corn in the summer. It was a world now gone but the memories live on.

So many stories, so much laughter, and so much love. No one is perfect and Nannie was hardly a plaster saint, but I know that she had a tremendous influence on my life. I am blessed to be her granddaughter and rich with her love. I know that as one friend told me “They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies.” Nannie will always be a part of me, and I hope my grandchildren love me as I love her.