I miss Meme. She was such a feisty little woman. I wish I could have spent more time with her and really gotten to know her. I love thinking back to the times I spent at her house with her and Papa Peden.
Her name was Lubie Clyde. She would be 98 on her birthday this Sunday.
We would sit at her kitchen table, and she would simultaneously teach me how to play dominoes while telling me to keep my feet off the railing under the table.
She always seemed to have all the lemon drops and angel food cake on hand. Lemon drops never tasted as good anywhere else, and her angel food cake was amazing. One day not so long ago I asked my mom if she had Meme's angel food cake recipe. She smiled and said, "I think she got it from a box mix."
Her and Papa always sat on the second row at church. When I would sit with them, they would play tic-tac-toe with me to keep me quiet.
We spent a lot of time on the swing in her back yard.
Christmas Eve was at Meme's every year for the first several years of my life. The only tree I ever remember her having was a stick painted white and decorated with lights and ornaments. I knew it wasn't the way our tree looked, but I never remember thinking that it was odd. It took a while for it to feel like Christmas when we stopped going to her house on Christmas Eve.
I don't remember her voice or her laugh, but I can remember laying on the floor in the middle of her den, playing dominoes, her with a toothpick in her mouth saying, "'Let me see...' said the blind man."
I remember going with her on a regular basis to the nursing home to visit Aunt Pudd and Miss Ada. She always took bananas to Miss Ada. I thought that was nice. It was years later when I realized that Aunt Pudd was Meme's sister.
When she got sick, she went to California for treatment. She brought back a pearl for me and had it set in a ring. I still have that ring and it is still very important to me.
The stories of her that my dad tells are some of the funniest I've ever heard. One involves her hurling stuff at him when he climbed a tree to get away from her. :)
If I try really, really hard, I can still smell her house.
She was strong and stubborn and funny.
Her funeral was the only time I saw my Papa cry, and had the largest amount of flowers I ever saw.
After she died, my Papa needed to repaint their house. Apparently, choosing the paint color had always been Meme's job. It was always a nice, muted yellow. When we drove by and saw that Papa had chosen the brightest most horrific yellow imagineable, we wondered what in the world made him choose that color.
"Clyde liked yellow," he said.
1 comment:
Sweet blog, thanks for sharing these great memories!! I miss Meme too, I think about here all the time. She was SO much fun and such a "cool" grandmother!!
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