My grandmother was a unique person for that time in history. She was an educated lady and is in the county history books, as being proprietor of the first woman owned business in Pontotoc County where she lived which was a Cosmetology School.
She had given up the school when my father (her oldest) was born as mothers provided the only day care in that time. I honestly believe she knew every superstition and/or saying that existed.
Many times I wished I had written them down and then authored a book in her name.
However, she was a country lady in so many ways. Everything we ate was grown, killed, caught or processed by us except for the staples (salt, etc.). And of course her weakness which was Pepsi Cola.
She was as much at home dressing a squirrel for stew as she was having tea with the home demonstration clubwomen.
She had an eight party telephone line and every Saturday morning she called the grocery store in town and gave them her grocery order. Around noon a truck would pull into the driveway and a man would deliver the groceries to the kitchen. MaMa made him stay there until she had checked everything against her list, then she would give him a piece of cake and send him on his way.
As a youngster, my ambition was to be a grocery delivery guy because of the cake.
As I grew older, I learned that she had a number of loves in her life. First and foremost was me and my two cousins and then the rest of her family. Not very far behind that was baseball and poker.
Every day in the mid afternoon there was a "Baseball game of the Day" on the radio and I can only remember missing one or two of them in all the years I was there. If the Brooklyn Dodgers were playing then you had to be doubly quiet as that was "Her" team.
Every Saturday night there was a neighborhood poker game at her house. It was basically a penny-ante game so you couldn’t win or lose much but then no one had much anyway.
She looked forward to those games and prepared snacks for them all day Saturday. When I was about eight she started including me in the game.
She had to put a pillow in my chair so I could see over the table but I learned to love the games we played: Draw Poker, five card stud, seven card stud, low hole card wild, baseball, red dog and others.
MaMa was a wonderful cook and sure pampered me most of the time. Once I complained that she didn’t have chicken and dumplings often enough. She served that to me two meals a day for about a month and I got so tired of it I didn’t eat any for over twenty years.
However, I learned then not to complain about things.
I have never seen anyone else cook eggs like she did. When there as a large family there she would cook the eggs all at once in an iron skillet. They would be about an inch thick and, somehow, there would be all types in the same skillet, over well to sunny side up.
She knew what everyone wanted and would serve them direct from the skillet.
She loved the holidays as she could show off with her cooking. My mother or Aunts were not allowed in her kitchen except to talk. Cooking was her job. She had a large buffet in her formal dining room and for Thanksgiving and Christmas she would have eight to ten different pies and cakes there plus about six different candies (divinity was her favorite).
She made the traditional items for the holidays. She always had turkey, dressing, giblet gravy, green beans, corn on the cob, cole slaw and homemade yeast rolls.
However, I really didn’t care for turkey so just before we ate, she would bring me a large slab of country ham she had made for me at the last minute.
While everyone else had to settle for turkey I had the best there was, Salt cured country ham from the smokehouse. Actually, she made sure everyone had something they especially liked.
I had a cousin that loved speckled butter beans with the flavor of okra but not the okra itself. She would make some for him and then remove the okra pods before serving him.
On Thanksgiving and Christmas morning she wanted the men out of the house so she sent us squirrel hunting until just before dinner time (noon). That way she didn’t have to fool with us and could get on with her cooking. By the time we returned, it was just a matter of dressing the squirrels, washing our hands and going to the table for a great meal.
MaMa developed a heart condition after I was grown and lived until May 1965, when she was seventy years old. That has been over forty years ago and I still miss her every day. I never thought there would be another like her but my late wife was as close as possible.
