I remember what the house was like when we spent the night at Grandma's.

[Bertha Venation]

In the evening, we'd sit on the floor in front of her big TV and eat Planter's Dry-Roasted Peanuts and drink Dr Pepper. We'd watch "Truth or Consequences," "Bowling for Dollars," and "What's My Line." The nubby carpet was dusty. I liked doing that so much; it's one of my best memories.

Suzy was Grandma's little black & white dog. Well, when I was a child, she was huge. I held her front paws and we danced; she was almost as tall as I was. But when I saw a picture after Grandma died, I was surprised at how little Suzy was.

Although I know it had to be small, the room we slept in seemed enormous to me. It held three twin beds with tiny nightstands between them.

After we all went to bed, the house was . . . nice. I don't know how else to describe it. I got out of bed once in the middle of the night and walked around. I liked it. The house was cool and dark and smelled like Grandma.

I can close my eyes and be standing in the kitchen, able to tell you where everything was. I remember the glasses my grandma and her husband drank their buttermilk from. I remember the brand of buttermilk -- Foremost -- and remember the label. I know the cabinets in which she kept her Melmac dishes. I think my sister still has Grandma's favorite paring knife, the one she used to peel an apple everyday for her husband's lunch. For breakfast Grandma gave us Raisin Bran -- actually bran flakes to which she added raisins. Same thing, really. She was inventive. I loved her salad dressing: mayonnaise, ketchup, and sweet pickle relish. I remember standing in the kitchen and Grandma giving me a Bubble-Up cold from the fridge.

On the back patio sat an old washing machine with a wringer. I'll never forget that. Grandma grew tomatoes in her garden, and I was grossed out watching her pluck the fat blue worms off the plants and smushing them underfoot. She had a plum tree and that was my favorite part of her backyard. I loved those plums so much. They were better than any plums I've ever had since.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

1. My Grandma drank a glass of buttermilk every day. She was the

best cook in the whole world and she had a Fig tree in the side yard. Thanks for bringing back the memories. :hug:

[Bertha Venation]

4. My grandma's fried chicken would beat your grandma's fried chicken --

And I bet my grandma's doorknobs were greasier on fried chicken day! :rofl:

[Tuesday Afternoon]

5. sister girl --

:rofl:

[auntAgonist]

2. I can close my eyes and draw in the aroma

of homemade soup simmering in my Grandma's kitchen. I can hear her voice, see her smile. I also remember the old, huge bathtub that was brought out for bathtime on a Saturday night. Right there, in the kitchen :)

Thank you SO much for sharing your precious memories.

:hug:

aA
kesha

[Inchworm]

3. Wonderful memories

I too remember visiting my Grandma.

I loved the entire trip. It was really my initiation to the traveling jones. We lived in Western Ohio and would drive down to Hialeah, Florida every other year or so. This trip resonated in my mind since the first time we went.

I remembered the crooked roads of The Appalachians vividly throughout my life. For years, at night, I'd imagine myself going through the mountains. The overlooks we visited were like windows to heaven. Both ends of the trip were very flat. The middle was beautiful.

Grandma's house in Hialeah was a nice stop on the trip. She had a room set up for us kids to play in while the grown-ups had cocktails and reminisced. My family was great that way. It kind of seems mean in this day and time, but the adults were of the mentality that kids do kid stuff, and grown-ups did theirs. If it was a pretty day they'd offer us two choices; inside or out. My older brother usually chose to stay in and my younger brother was too small to choose. I always chose OUT. I got to roam the neighborhood alone and meet new friends.

About a block away was a elementary school where all us kids wtfpwnd all. We played ball, climbed trees, explored everything, and generally took it all in. Since I chose "out" I was only expected to come in for meals and be back when the street lights came on. The days were full of joy and learning.

Years passed...

My dad and mom split. My dad moved to that middle I mentioned. The mountains of North Carolina were beautiful. After being too much of a terrorist for my mom to handle I ended up moving to NC myself. At the time, I hated it, nothing to do. no party zones, no tourists to mess with, people talked funny and they seemed weird. I really grew up here. I was rarely here once I could escape, but it was always my home.

I live less than an hour from that vision I had in my mind of passing through the mountains as a child.

Life is good.

:hi:

[WCIL]

6. I loved spending the night at Grandma's

Our parents would drop us off after dinner and we would watch Grandpa clean fish if he had been fishing that day, and then we would play horseshoes. Grandma would pop us popcorn in bacon fat, and we got to split a bottle of Pepsi between the 3 of us - we never got soda at home. Grandma and Grandpa grew up in the country, so we all went to bed early. In the morning Grandpa would walk down to the bakery and bring home sweet rolls for breakfast, and we got to put half and half in our cereal.

Then we would help Grandma with her chores for the day, like drying clothes on the clothesline. She had several old aprons with huge pockets for the clothespins, and we would all wear one and hang up the easy things like socks and washcloths. Grandpa worked at the paper mill, and if he was on 3-11 we would help her pack his "dinner bucket". Hot dishes went into the sturdy wide-mouthed thermos I haven't seen the likes of in years, and she wrapped everything else in wax paper. Sometimes Grandpa would take us with him to the hardware store or the grocery store (Grandma didn't drive).

We always stayed for dinner (what we called lunch at my house), and it was always the big meal of the day at Grandma's. Dad would come early enough that he could eat too, and then he would stay and talk with his parents for a while and we would check Grandma's raspberry bushes or ride around on their antique pedal cars.

Reading this is sounds like it happened fifty years ago, but this was the early '70's.

[tigereye]

7. it's fun to picture grandmothers' kitchens, isn't it?

My mom's mom had a kitchen with those 40s tables and metal trimmed chairs, and an old, big white 40s stove and fridge, spotlessly clean. She used to make fish and scrapple for breakfast. She was a bit fan of all kinds of meat... as well as an old-school, ward- chair Republican. She also had a great garden with a little cottage out back.

[datasuspect]

8. grandma had a six pack of old style

and psychotic episodes.

she told us to shut up because richard nixon was talking directly to us.

[Flying Dream Blues]

11. !!!

[Tuesday Afternoon]

15. ~

:hug:

[Blue Diadem]

9. Those are great memories Bertha.

How lucky you are to have them. I didn't really know either of my Grandma's. Although we only had a couple very brief visits, I do have a pleasant memory of each. One was when my Dad's Mom came in while we were visiting an aunt. She didn't say anything to me, but she did come up and give me a kiss on the cheek. It was winter and I remember she was so cold, but I guess she did a lot of walking through town.

The other is of my Mom's mother. I remember her stopping by to visit on her move across the country. I remember her holding me and rocking me in a big plaid stuffed rocker.

[driver8]

10. My great-grandmother used to make the most amazing molasses cookies...

Her kitchen always smelled like those cookies.

My grandparents lived next door to my great-grandparents and we used to stay with them when we were kids. I remember at night we would watch tv and have ice cream or root beer floats. Before we went to sleep, my grandmother would read us stories...

I remember that we grandchildren would wait by my grandparents' huge picture window for my grandfather to come home. He worked late and often didn't make it home for supper with us, so we would sit around the table while he ate and bother him with all sorts of questions.

What wonderful days those were!!

[Flying Dream Blues]

12. Great memories!

My grandparents' house was also full of wonders. My grandmother always made us merengue cookies in different colors and kept them in a glass jar for us to take as we wished. She drank her coffee in a wicker chair in the kitchen while my grandfather made us waffles on a really old waffle iron (it had a cloth-covered cord if you remember those). We also got to have "coffee milk" at their house, and coke floats in the evening out of those hammered metal cups in all different colors that were so popular back then. In the back of the kitchen was a breakfast room with a big picture window that looked out over the yard, with trees and flowers and a huge vegetable garden. There were several staircases and loud wood floors we clomped around on, and our special room had dormer windows and a big box fan that sounded like a B52 taking off that helped cool the summer nights while we slept.

[grasswire]

13. this is making me really sad

"Backward, turn backward O time in your flight.
Make me a child again, just for tonight"

From where I am sitting right now I can see the back corner of the house that was my grandmother's -- a house that was filled with her spirit, her energy, her pleasure at having 15 rambunctious grandchildren. She's long gone. One man lives in that huge house now; a stranger.

I spent most of my adult years elsewhere. All my cousins are dispersed and rarely see each other.

The American story was played out in that house daily. The stories of the uncle in a POW camp on Corregidor, the weddings by the fireplace, the holiday dinners, the games of Monopoly in the back room, the scandal of an aunt who smoked and drank beer, the grandpa dipping candles just because he knew how, the sleigh bells that came from the old family home in New England, the bon bons in grandmother's desk, the silver box commemorating my grandmother's christening of a liberty ship, the laundry chute from second floor to basement that nearly engulfed a little cousin, the wind-up Victrola relegated to the basement, and the Christmases -- oh the Christmases. Each child received a brand new dollar bill in an envelope. Imagine that! And grandfather checking to see how many olive pits each child had hidden under the edge of his/her dinner plate. Oops. Busted.

There was no feeling ever in my life again of being in the bosom of a happy gang of relatives. I miss it so.

[auntAgonist]

14. sweet memories.

:hug:
"There was no feeling ever in my life again of being in the bosom of a happy gang of relatives."

ain't that the truth!!!

aA

kesha

[HughBeaumont]

16. For us, it was:

"Price is Right"
various cartoons
"Gong Show"
"Wheel Of Fortune"
RC Cola
Hydrox cookies and half-stale Oreos.
Product 19 cereal.
Refrigerated Peanut Butter.
Killer fudge cookies by Keebler.
All of the moms and aunts drank near-white coffee that I had to get away from because it was nasty.
Spaghetti from the Old World
In later years, I'd bring the Atari 2600 and have to place it on the black and white TV with the non-coax hookup
Her record player with all of these old 45s, Al Martino and K-Tel albums that my mom and aunts left behind.
This bed we jumped on until it was lumpy.
A vegetable garden, dilapidated brick fire pit, a ton of trees to climb and a grape vine when it was in season.
Gravel driveway.
Basement filled with tricycles and chairs. A work shop with strange tools. Washing machines from the 50s. A shower that I was scared of. An old ping pong table.
An old big Garage that housed a Nova and a bunch of coffee cans full of old bolts and automotive accessories.
Photo albums and old TV guides from the 70s.
An upstairs with a giant crawlspace that housed tons of old magazines.

Takes me back, I tells ya. I need to pay it a visit.

[hunter]

17. My grandparents were disfunctional and sorta scary.

I had just one grandparent who was almost good with kids, but still, every visit to my grandparents was an unpredictable adventure into crazy and it was a crapshoot whether it would be an interesting safe cozy kind of crazy, or a bad kind of crazy where David Lynch is dueling with Tim Burton behind every closed door and David Lynch is winning.

:scared:

My own kids are lucky. They've got nice grandparents.

[MorningGlow]

18. Grandma and grandpa's

Thanks for this, Bertha. It takes me back.

My grandparents had moved from "the homestead" (the big rambling house where my mother and her siblings grew up) to a small ranch by the time I came along. Even though they were well into their 80s, grandma and grandpa used to babysit me all day during the summer and every afternoon when school was in session.

I was used to their house in the daytime: Mornings started in the steamy kitchen--thick, dark coffee made in a percolator, softboiled eggs in a white enamel pot on the stove. My grandfather could eat a stack of toast higher than the top of my head. And for some reason they poured milky coffee on their cereal (corn flakes, I believe) instead of milk. The softboiled eggs smelled so good, I thought I'd like the taste, but I didn't.

After breakfast I played or read in the living room while grandma watched game shows. Grandma never wanted me to put my cheek on the rug--she said it was dirty and would make sores on my face. Grandpa puttered in the basement, which always smelled like oil (he had oil cans like the one in the Wizard of Oz), or in the garage, which was only a one-car garage, but seemed vast without a car in it. He had to give up driving years earlier because of his eyesight.

When it was warm, grandpa worked in the vegetable garden. It was enormous, running across the whole rear of the suburban lot, with tomatoes, eggplant, corn, beans, peppers, and so much more I've forgotten. Grandma would take me outside and I'd eat a tomato, hot from the sun, right off the vine. We'd collect the green tomatoes that had fallen to the ground and put them on the windowsill of the enclosed back porch to ripen. There was a dusty glider with cracked vinyl cushions on the porch that I'd rock in sometimes.

There was a stretch of pines running the length of the side of the yard, blocking the neighbors. I could hear them on the other side of the trees, but I could never see them. It made that area of the yard quite mysterious. There was also a white lilac bush and a purple lilac bush that never seemed to get very big. In May, I would run back and forth between the two, sniffing them, to decide which scent I liked better. I always seemed to prefer the purple ones. There was also a cherry tree that grandma said was "diseased" but it was just the sap leaking out of a split in the trunk.

Sometimes I ate lunch on the floor in the living room while grandma watched soap operas that I ignored; other times she'd sit at the telephone table in a small alcove in the dining room and talk in rapid-fire Italian to relatives. I never knew what got her so worked up, but she'd always talk faster and faster and louder and louder till she seemed to trip over her words.

After the soap operas were over, I got to watch syndicated sitcoms like I Love Lucy or Gilligan's Island until my mom arrived, around 5:20, to pick me up, talk with her parents, and then take me home to a much quieter house.

I only spent the night at my grandparents' house once or twice, and it was weird, seeing the house in shadow, having milk and cookies in the oddly lit-up living room, washing up in the rose-colored bathroom that smelled like Ivory soap. There were only two bedrooms, and my grandparents didn't sleep in the same room, so I slept in a small bed with my grandmother. She complained that grandpa snored, but so did she.

Sometimes she would show me the two portraits that she kept in the bottom drawer of her dresser. They were both of her father. In one he was younger and clean-shaven--she preferred that one; in the other he had a full beard. She always brushed past that one, saying he had been sick when that photo was taken. Later I knew that his beard was the fashion of the day (in the late 1800s)--she just didn't like it. I now have her bedroom set as our bureau and chest of drawers (but not the bed--it was too small).

My grandparents died in their mid-90s when I was a teenager. Interesting that memories of their place is so vivid.

[Rambis]

19. We played cards

ate butter brickel ice cream and apple crumble. She had an orange tabby cat the lived in the hollow tree in the yard and no one could touch him but her and me. There was no heat in the bedroom. Once you were in bed and the blankets piled on top of you there was no way you could turn over or get out of bed without help. The telephone was a party line and the operators name was Sarah. Having watched Andy Griffith I thought Sara was the operator for the continental United States.

[JNelson6563]

20. Very sweet post.

Takes me back to times at my Grandma's up on Manitoulin Island in Canada. Neat as a pin and some of the best food I've ever had in my life. Splendid really. Thanks for the nudge toward memory lane.

:toast:

Julie

[fight4my3sons]

21. My grandma died 25 years ago today.

I still remember her cinnamon toast. I wished she had lived long enough to see my boys. My oldest is named after her husband whom I never got to meet. He died of a heart attack long before I was born. I miss my grandma. I think my life would have been different if cancer had not of taken her when I was so young.

[Born_A_Truman]

22. My three year old granddaughter is here today...

I hope we are making memories!

I have many fond memories of being with my grandparents.