This is another true story. I just wrote it up.

My Grandmother’s House


We called my grandmother Nannie. When I was a child she lived with her mother. We called her Grandmother. That’s what Dad called her, since she was his grandmother. And my brother and I picked it up from there.

Nannie and Grandmother lived in a house that my grandfather had remodeled. Papaw bought the house when Dad was a boy. It was already about sixty years old then, small and old-fashioned. Papaw bricked it up and modernized it and turned it into a tolerable place. Dad does not recall it having been a particularly comfortable house, due to its awkward layout and the fact that he and his two brothers had to share one little room. It didn’t matter so much, since they spent all possible time outside.

Nannie and Papaw lived in several different towns over the years, but they kept this house and the land that it sat on. By the time Papaw died (when I was very small), they were living there again. Grandmother, also widowed, moved in with Nannie and they lived together until Grandmother’s death. Nannie lived there until I was in my late 20s. Then she had to move into a retirement apartment. The family still owns the house and rents it out.

Though I haven’t been inside it in the ten years or so since Nannie last lived there, I can still walk through it in my mind. From the outside it looks rather cozy and homey. It has a small main body, with a wing for the living room sticking out one end. A chimney rises from the end of this little wing. The whole thing is covered in Papaw’s excellent brick work.

There are two front doors. One has a window in it and looks rather nice. It led into the living room and was never used much. The other, closer to the car port on the end of the house opposite the living room, led into the little informal den. This was where we did most of our visiting. It had a couch and a couple of chairs and an ottoman that my brother and I played with when we were little. It also had a big reddish chest that we were allowed to sit on before we got too big. There was an end table in which she kept a couple of little cars and other “play pretties” for the grandkids when we came to visit. A bookcase held several old issues of Reader’s Digest, some of that magazine’s condensed books, and an edition of Pilgrim’s Progress with a book jacket that showed Christian hiking along the road. And it had lots and lots of family pictures, on the bookcase and elsewhere.

Nannie also kept her sewing table there. When she would baby sit us during the summer when Mom was in summer school, she would do her sewing while we played or read nearby. Nannie had bought her first sewing machine without Papaw’s knowledge many years earlier, after he had told her he didn’t think they should spend money on one. She had soon demonstrated that she could make it pay for itself by doing all the family’s mending and making things on commission for others. Papaw later told her that he was glad she went against him that one time. After he died Nannie continued to support herself as a seamstress. She was certainly a great one. The last sewing that I know of that she ever did was some last-minute dress work at our wedding.

Usually we went to visit with Mom or Dad or both together. Then we would sit in the living room and the adults would talk while the kids hopefully stayed out of trouble. In the evening Grandmother (until she got too ill to do it) would pop popcorn for us all. Once in a while my brother and I got to spend the night at Nannie’s. Then we would sleep on the couch in the den, which pulled out into a bed. I thought that was the neatest thing!

One other item in the den was an old clock, a big wind-up tabletop clock with carving around it. It ticked loudly all through the day and night. Once an hour it suddenly began whirring and bonged out the hours. When I was very little it scared me. I wasn’t the only one it scared. It had belonged to Grandmother and her second husband. A couple of years ago I learned that while he was alive it had on two separate occasions struck thirteen. Each time someone he knew had died soon afterward. He had refused to run it after that! It now sits, long silent, in Mom and Dad’s living room.

Nannie usually had the door open in good weather, day or night, to let the breezes in. We spent many an evening visiting in that room, while the crickets chirped outside and the occasional car rolled by on the street. On a couple of occasions I remember it raining just a few feet away from us outside that door. Nannie said that she once looked out the door during a rainstorm and saw lightning hit a passing car.

From the den a very short hall led past a long, narrow bathroom to Grandmother’s room. The hall contained a telephone table and a picture of the Crucifixion that transformed into a view of the Resurrection when you stood back from it. That almost magical transformation naturally fascinated me.

Grandmother’s room was shaped like an L. Her big, very high bed filled all of one side of it. Years before it had served as Dad and his brothers’ cramped bedroom. It really must have been something to fit three growing boys in there, even with bunks!

A doorway in the left-hand side of the hall led into the kitchen. It was rather long and narrow. A buffet table crowded against one wall to the left. Also to the left was the door to Nannie’s room. To the right were the stove, sink, cabinets, and table. The space for the table was so narrow that it had to be pushed almost right up against the wall. Only young children could slip into the space between it and the wall.
Naturally smaller grandkids like my brother and I had to sit there when we ate over. The wall above our heads was covered with souvenir plates that Nannie had gotten from all over the country. She must have had at least twenty of them.

The kitchen was adequate for a small party of people to eat. I loved Nannie’s fried catfish, her cornbread, and most of all her rolls. On Thanksgiving or Christmas, when we had a couple dozen people there, I don’t know how we fit everybody into the room to ask the blessing. The actual meal had to be spread around the house.

A door in the wall opposite the hallway gave access to the living room. This door had a lot of little glass panels with a curtain that could be drawn across it. One of the bottom panels was missing. Naturally Dad and his brothers had had something to do with that! On cold nights the living room would be closed off from the rest of the house. Cold gusts would blow through the missing panel. I was reluctant to go into the kitchen up close to that door at night, out of a vague fear that something might be lurking in the darkness beyond that strange door, ready to reach out through the empty panel and grab me.

The living room had no ceiling light, just a couple of lamps. It was not used all that much at night. The furniture looked a little nicer. On the far end stood the fireplace and mantel. Some of my earliest memories are of curling up in front of that fireplace like a hearth cat. Later Nannie closed up the fireplace and replaced it with a more efficient wood stove.

Little china figurines stood in niches on the mantelpiece. They looked vaguely like German figurines, but were in fact made in occupied Japan. Papaw had brought them home from his tour of duty on Okinawa after the war. My brother has them now.

Near the fireplace was a very 1950ish wooden cabinet containing three old sets of encyclopedias. Two of them had few illustrations, and so I paid them little attention. The third was a 1959 edition World Book full of lavish photos and drawings and interesting articles. I must have spent hours with that encyclopedia set. When I was little I looked at the pictures. As I got older I actually read the articles. I learned a lot of words and interesting facts. When Nannie had to move and get rid of most of her possessions, the World Book set was assigned to me. It now sits in our living room, and is still used.

The living room had a big picture window facing the street and several smaller windows. Each smaller window had a sill made of dark, veined marble, shiny-smooth and cold to the touch. The shelves on the mantelpiece were made of similar marble. It never occurred to me as a child that this marble looked awfully fine for such a modest house. Eventually I learned the story behind it.

During the 1950s Winthrop Rockefeller built an experimental agriculture complex called Winrock Farms on the flat top of Mount Petit Jean, overlooking the Arkansas River. Papaw and some of his relatives traveled the hundred-plus miles to Petit Jean to join the work crews building the farm. They spent a couple of weeks up on the mountain working on it. Being rich as a Rockefeller, Winthrop Rockefeller spared no expense in fitting out the main house. It had a huge chimney and hearth trimmed in dark, veined marble. When they were done there were a few pieces left over. Papaw got permission to take some back home, to put in the house he was remodeling. So my grandmother had Rockefeller marble in her house.

The last room in the house was Nannie’s room. We very seldom went in there. She had pictures there, including one of Papaw during his time in the Army. In her closet Nannie had a Japanese samurai sword that he had brought back from his service in Okinawa and Korea just a couple of years after World War II. The sword was said to be a real antique. I’ve wondered sometimes about its history. The katana especially fascinated my brother.

Beneath the house Nannie had a basement, a rarity in our part of the state. I liked getting the chance to go down the concrete outdoor stairway (I fell down that stairway once). The celler smelled very musty and earthy. Mostly it had a bunch of junk. Now and then someone would have to go down there for one of the useful items it still housed.

Out back squatted a concrete well-head. Nannie cleaned fish on top of it. Nearby she had a sheet metal box full of soil where she raised angle worms. The yard dropped off very steeply from there. You could actually roll down part of it, if you weren’t careful.

A little road ran past the house and yard into the property out back. Though Nannie lived right on the edge of town, you could mostly see woods from her house. She owned several hilly acres. One of our older cousins used to take us for walks out there. There were the remains of two old Studebaker cars hidden out there in those woods. Papaw had always liked Studebakers.

Also out in back Nannie had a good-sized pond with steep, woody banks that made it look to a child like a little mountain lake. On a couple of occasions we went out on it in a boat. Usually we sat on the banks and watched Nannie and Grandmother fish. Once we had to haul Grandmother out when she lost her footing. I was as scared then as I’d ever been, afraid we had lost her. Fortunately eighty-year-old ladies aren’t always quite as fragile as you think they are.

Eventually one of my uncles built a house out there on the bank of the pond. It had one story in front and two stories, the upper one overlooking the steep-sided pond, in back. Once when my brother and a cousin and I were trying to sink a can in the pond with a BB gun (they kept laughing at my attempts), we were startled to hear a crack from above and saw the can jump in the water. There up on the deck on the side of the house stood our uncle with his .22 rifle. The can filled and sank in seconds.

After graduating from college I left the state to go to grad school. I came home whenever I could for the holidays. Now and then I swung by Nannie’s place to talk to her. I had finally gotten old enough to talk to her as an adult, one on one. She told me a lot of things about the family. I learned how she and Papaw had met and married. I heard the story of how he had surrendered to preach (he pastored a church as well as working construction full-time), after years of resisting the call. She told about his time supervising an Army mess hall in Korea, where he had taken some orphaned kitchen girls under his wing and tried unsuccessfully to adopt some of them and take them home.

I found out that Papaw, whom I am said to favor, could not resist reading any book he found while visiting someone else’s house. So that’s where I got it from! And I got a few things from Nannie herself as well. That weird look I get when trying to eat something I don’t like without admitting I don’t like it came straight from her. I also learned that my silver-haired Nannie had once been a honey blond, as I was before my hair started going dark and then grey. If it turns her color when I’m old, I don’t think I’ll mind one bit.

Nannie’s last years were spent in a retirement apartment complex, then in a nursing home, and finally, when her mind and health were both pretty well all gone, mostly in a hospital. It was hard to see her toward the end. Dad and his brothers and sister stayed around her in relays. We were sad when she died, of course, but not crushed. Her time had very clearly come, and the end of a life as long and good as hers is no tragedy.

The only tangible reminders we have of her now are scattered pictures and other possessions—the World Book, a few pieces of furniture, the clock, the huge box of quilts she and Grandmother had made. And the house is still there, of course. One of these days, when I have the chance and the place is between renters, I’m going to have to borrow the key from Dad and take a walk through it.

I feel the same way about my own grandmother's house. I can walk it in my mind, I can picture boxes stuffed with emvelopes stuffed with bills piled up the spare room, hear small brass dresser handles rattle as I shake the bedroom floor with my footsteps, and see my aunt's neat as a pin room that reminds me of green.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg, and the house is long sold.

Thanks for making me remember.

I'm glad it helped bring back your own fond memories. It's always good to be able to have those of people.