Family

I lost my grandmother Gladys Moore on the 23rd of June in 1982, she was only 81. For some that may seem like she was really old but it wasn’t for me. It never was when it came to my grandmother. My mother told me one time that my grandmother (whom she respected but didn’t get along with very well) had told her that out of all the grandchildren I was her favorite. I wonder if that came about because I was born with a hole in my heart? As my cardiologist told me all babies are born with a hole in their heart but about a month after birth it has usually healed shut. Mine never did but that is another story for another time and place. My grandmother’s first name was Minnie, named after her mother Minnie Mae (Martin) Jennings. I didn’t know that was her first name until the day of her funeral. I felt like I was in a dream and I would wake up and she would still be there but it was not a dream and she was gone. I felt sorry for my grandfather, to have been married that long and now he was all alone. If my grandmother had lived to see Christmas they would have been married for 60 years. They were married on Christmas Day in 1923. When I came onto the scene in September of 1958 my grandmother was middle age and years of diabetes had taken its toll on her. They still lived on the farm located in the Fairbanks Community Northwest of Quitman, Arkansas. When I was little and we would go up there every Saturday after my dad got off work just to spend the night and come back home the next day. It was spooky to a little kid back then. There weren’t any street lights out in the country and sometimes when we drove up that way it would be really foggy. One Christmas I remember it being real foggy and we almost missed the road to turn off onto Hwy 92 that led out to the old Baptist Church at the Fairbanks Community where we would make our turn towards my grandfather's farm. We didn’t have air conditioning in our car as some people did, aftermarket stuff like that was out of my dads' price range back then and not very practical according to him. We eased along in the fog only going about 20 mph so we wouldn’t miss the turn or hit a deer or someone’s dog who happened to be sleeping in the middle of the road. For December it was really really warm and foggy. No snow this year, maybe rain but no snow. When we crossed the old metal bridge I knew we were getting closer to the turn-off to go to my grandfather's farm. The road leading to his farm didn’t have a name and if it did no one ever bothered to put a signpost out that way to say what the name of it was. The road leading to his farm was the spookiest of all the roads up there. It was a real narrow road and when it rained real hard you could feel the car slide a little bit as it was mostly dirt over a bunch of slate that had been dumped on the old trailer path that had been there before. The trees hung over the road like they were waiting for me to come down there and they would grab me out of the car and take me away to the woods. That was what I thought anyway. Always scared me going down that road. At the last turn to the farm was a low water bridge that really was a huge flat rock that had been placed there so people could drive over it instead of trying to drive their vehicle through the creek bed. We crossed that rock bridge one night after a heavy rain and the back of the car sort of slide over towards the creek, my mother made a weird sound, and then we were on the other side. It wasn’t like we were going to float down to the next county or anything as the creek never got over about a foot deep even in heavy rain. I guess she just didn’t want to get her feet wet. We pulled up the hill in the dark, it was spooky as everyone had already gone to bed, it was after midnight before we got to the farm. Wow, it was really foggy on the hill where his house was. I kept expecting something to come out of the fog for me. I was a nervous little guy way back then.

My grandfather, his given name was James Willie Moore but everyone just called him Bill, came out of the house right as we pulled up. I asked him why the wooden door was open and he said that it had gotten too hot in the house even with several fans blowing so he had opened the front wooden door before he went to bed. I asked him if he was afraid someone might come into his house if the door wasn’t locked and he just laughed and said no. I loved my grandfather, I didn’t understand him in the ways he did things but I still loved him. To me, he had guts to go to bed and leave the door unlocked. He had a wooden screen door with a latch on it but anyone with a knife could just come on in through the cut screen or that was what I kept thinking the whole time I was there anyway. Soon we would be tucked away into the old cast iron bed minus the several layers of quilts that we normally would have when it was cold. Oh, darn. My cousins were already there so we kids got to sleep on a pallet on the floor. We always thought that was such a novel idea to sleep on the floor as we did. Before we knew it someone was making us get up off the floor and get out of the way of the kitchen. Seems to me like I just laid down, this sure didn’t seem fair to me but little kids like me never had a say in anything that went on in the country. What a breakfast it would be, scrambled eggs, sausage, sometimes bacon, homemade biscuits from scratch, and sorghum molasses. My grandfather used to take the grease from frying the sausage and pour some into his plate and sop the grease up with a biscuit. I have tried it over the years, I guess it’s just a generation thing or something he did when they didn’t have a lot to eat I guess.

When breakfast was finally over and the dishes washed then we could have Christmas out in the country, minus the cold or snow at least for that year anyway. My grandfather would cut a good size cedar tree(I think that was what it was) drag it back to his house, set it up, and decorate it. I don’t know if my grandmother did much of the decorating since she could hardly walk and her legs always swelled something awful. It looked like a madhouse with everyone opening presents at the same time. One of my fondest memories of that time was when we got a present from our grandparents. They didn’t have a lot of money and lived a long way from any store so it felt really special to get something from them. It was a simple gift, an apple, an orange, some nuts and some hard candy, the ribbon kind, always my favorite back then. To me, it felt like the greatest gift anyone had ever given me. I like the simple things in life, always have. Before too long my cousins would be leaving to go to their other grandmothers' house and spend some time with her and her family. We didn’t get to spend very much time with them like that. It always made me sad when they would leave because I knew I might see them once that summer and that would be it till next Christmas. In 1972 with their health declining they decided to sell the farm and move to Little Rock. There were too far away from any doctors where they lived. My grandmother was allergic to bee stings so I guess in retrospect it was a good move for them. It wasn’t the same to see them in the city as it had been at the farm. It didn’t take a couple of hours, now it only took 30–45 minutes depending on traffic. There had always been things to do on the farm. Go to the pond and skip rocks if you could find some flat ones, go to the creek and look for arrowheads or my favorite thing, snakes. Or just go down to the barn, crawl up into the hayloft and just listen to the cows mooing in the stalls under you. Peaceful and tranquil. The city had none of that, it was boring with the exception of admiring my grandmother's rose bushes. She really had a knack for growing rose bushes. I should be so lucky! She had a huge yellow and red rose bush that my grandfather had put lines of small rope along the brick facing and trained the vines to follow the rope. It was a really nice look to a rather boring brick-faced wall of their house. Life changed a lot after the move to the city. We didn’t go visit them every weekend as we had before. My grandfather would call and we would talk to him on the phone some but it wasn’t the same, it felt alien to me and I know it must have felt alien to my grandparents as well. My grandfather had been a farmer just as his father had been a farmer and his father before him had been a farmer. The Moore’s had immigrated to the United States from Ireland, they had all been farmers. You can’t just up and give that up after so many years of working the land and seeing what you have planted burst out of the ground anew and rise up toward the sunlight.

As time moved on both of my grandparents would end up in a nursing home. Diabetes my grandmother had fought all those years ago was slowly but surely taking her from us. Somehow she went into anaphylactic shock and was rushed by ambulance to the hospital. My dad, his dad, and I sat with her for a long time. I had been out of the Navy for almost a year by then. I had my own car and was looking at attending college in the fall. I wasn’t ready for her to leave yet. I hadn’t met some little gal as my grandfather used to call girls yet to introduce her to my grandmother. My dad told me that I should go on home and he would call me if and when she passed. About four that morning he called to tell me that she was gone. I felt numb, I went back to bed, I couldn’t go back to sleep so I just laid there and cried like a little kid. My grandmother who had always talked about the animals on the farm and her flowers that she loved so much, who taught me the kinder, gentler side of life was now gone.

On the 23rd of January in 1985, I lost my grandfather too. My grandfather had been born on the 29th of July in 1897. I often wondered about all the things he had seen in and done in his lifetime. I know in 1962 he and another man tore down the old drafty house they had been using to build a more modern one with indoor plumbing and electricity for lights instead of coal oil lanterns. The old house had a huge fireplace as this was where all their cooking would take place. My dad said that it was at least 6 feet tall and about that wide. The way my dad put it my grandfather was a jack of all trades and was really good with whatever he was doing. I wish I had inherited some of that, I can’t even draw a straight line with a ruler much less build a house like my grandfather did, or plow fields from the crack of dawn till dark with a team of mules, or dig a huge garden mostly by hand. Maybe it skipped a generation, figures.