Today marks the 130th anniversary of the birth of my grandmother. She was one of the greatest women I’ve ever known and had a significant influence on my life. She died almost 38 years ago, but there aren’t many days when I don’t think of her. Here is a column I wrote about her in 2011.
My mother’s mother lived to be 92. As far as I know, she didn’t work out at a gym, run or exercise.
She simply worked hard. Every day.
I believe physical fitness and a good diet are important, but let’s face it: Some of life expectancy is a combination of good genes and luck.
Her name was Mary Smith, a very common name. But she was no ordinary woman. I remember her as a petite woman with white hair, a beautiful singing voice and patience and compassion that I can only dream of having.
My grandmother washed her clothes with a wringer washer all her life. She did all of her dishes by hand. She scrubbed her floors on the floor.
In her later years she had an electric stove, but it was awhile after that before she gave up the coal stove that cooked many Sunday dinners.
And there were lots of those. Every Sunday after church, our family would go to my grandparents’ house for a big, cooked meal at lunchtime. Most times it was fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, corn and a few other vegetables that some of us tried to avoid. The chicken wasn’t fried in oil. She used good, old-fashioned lard.
Lard also was used for her annual doughnut day marathon, which began in the early morning hours. She fried them in a large cast-iron pan, and we ate them covered in powdered sugar or dipped in good, old-fashioned Turkey Syrup.
One of my favorite memories of grandma’s kitchen, however, was the cookie baking. Her tollhouse (chocolate chip), molasses and peanut butter cookies were excellent. But no cookie ever has come close to her sugar cookies. She kept them in half-gallon glass containers on the shelf along the stairs to the cellar.
My sister and I knew right where they were, and I’m sure she always knew what we were doing there so often. Somehow the jar never seemed to go empty.
My mother learned to make those sugar cookies. So did my wife and a few of the great-grandchildren. There was no recipe, though they eventually wrote down something that was close. But they never got them exactly right.
Grandma would dump the flour, sugar, buttermilk and other ingredients into a large bowl and mix them all without instructions. And they always turned out perfect. Always.
She rolled them out on an old Hoosier cabinet that she had “gone housekeeping with” when she married my grandfather. The Hoosier had been painted several times, the last one white. I know, because we removed all that paint when we refinished it for our kitchen after she died 30 years ago.
I think about her sometimes when I’m tired or when I worry about my lack of exercise and what it does to my health. Or when I eat something that supposedly isn’t healthy. During those times, I hope that perhaps I’m lucky enough to have her good genes so I can overcome things that have replaced her fried chicken, gravy and sugar cookies.
I still miss those things. Almost as much as I miss her.
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