My Dad’s Mom

My grandmother’s house was small and white with a freshly cut lawn and a garden out back. When I think of it I remember fat, fresh tomatoes that oozed onto the picnic table on the side porch when we bit into them whole, like apples. We’d oversalt them with the tiny Mason jar salt shaker and dig at the gritty rind with our front teeth. Even our bare, dusty feet would be speckled with seeds.

Inside the the house smoke hung like wet velvet from meat frying on the stove and nearly constant cigarette smoking. The tiny house was always filled with people for supper on Sundays. Cousins, their cousins and friends of somebody’s uncle would all come down for fried pork chops and turnip greens, white beans and white bread. Granny would cook in her nightgown with her shoes off, hacking and smoking all the while. Every time we came to visit Granny asked if we’d "et yet." I think feeding her family was one of the only ways my grandmother knew how to tell us she loved us.

I’d eat dinner on the front porch or on the couch watching network television. I’d eat wherever my sister was. Sometimes I’d read the stack of National Enquirers that littered the dingy home or my grandfather’s football magazines. Once dinner was over the women would clean up and do the dishes while the men pulled up chairs and shuffled cards. Cigarette smoke would once again choke the air. Amy and I learned by experience that smoke rises–we spent a lot of time on the floor. We’d be lying face down, sometimes breathing right into the carpeting, to escape the thick layers of smoke. The brown carpet was aways full of crumbs and hair and lint.

I’d lie in the floor and listen to the sound of coins smacking the table and how dueces were wild and this was seven-card draw. I barely knew what "ante up" meant, because they never let me play. I wasn’t any good at it since I was seven or four and ten. Poker slang was the soundtrack to the boring, eye-stinging visits to grandmother’s house.

She died from complications from emphesema. She passed away and pretty much all I know about her is that she worked at a mat factory, was addicted to gambling and never talked to me much about anything. And that she could raise some pretty amazing things, especially tomatoes.