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Grandmother's House
Some of my fondest childhood memories are the times I spent at my
grandmother's, Gertrude Leonard Giddings. We called her Mama Ginnie,
with a hard "G," a name given to her by the oldest grandchild who
couldn't say Mama Giddings. It became a name family and friends
affectionately called her the rest of her life.
In the 1940s my sister Mae, brother Giles, and I boarded the Santa Fe in
Houston each summer for a week's visit in Somerville, a small community
in central Texas. It was like living in another era when visiting my
grandmother. She was born in 1878 in Beaumont, and I'm sure she never
drove a car in her life. She lived two blocks from town and three blocks
from the Methodist church, and walked everywhere.
Her home, built in 1905, still stands today. A wide hall runs the length
of the house with two large rooms on each side. Each room has its own
fireplace. The upstairs floor plan is the same. All rooms, back in my
father's childhood, served as bedrooms with the exception of one located
downstairs at the back. Connected by a serving corridor to the kitchen,
it was the dining room. After my grandfather died and the children moved
away, it became Mama Ginnie's bedroom. With a hook lock on the door--the
only lock in the house--she felt secure at night.
In the days when my siblings and I visited, the wide hall had a potbelly
stove and a hand-cranked telephone on the wall, leftovers from bygone
days. In the kitchen was a brown wooden icebox. The iceman came through
the back door each morning carrying a block of ice in ice tongs and put
the block in the top compartment. We made ice water of the old block,
the only way we could drink the soft water that tasted like soap.
The house, with no radio or telephone, had a quiet, peaceful atmosphere.
There were no toys, but bored we were not. We climbed huge mulberry
trees in the yard and used our imagination to entertain ourselves. I
liked to play "store" on the side porch that had a banister. Every
morning Mama Ginnie fixed three buckets of soapy water and gave each of
us a washboard. We scrubbed socks on the screened-in back porch to our
hearts' content.
At noon we walked one block to Miss Carrie's where my grandmother took
her big meal of the day. Miss Carrie cooked for boarders, mostly
employees of the nearby Santa Fe tie plant, serving family-style around
her large table that accommodated about twenty-five people. Every thirty
minutes the table would be reset and fresh food brought out for the next
group. Miss Carrie always served squash. Us grandkids had to take at
least one bite of everything, grandmother's rule--she said she was
paying for it. Because I gagged when trying to get the squash down, it
was taken off my "must eat" list.
Mama Ginnie told the funniest stories. One time, she said, the maid
baked a pecan pie that the family ate after dinner that night. Not until
the next day, when the maid complained about a sore jaw, did my
grandmother learn the girl had cracked the pecans, not with the
nutcracker, but with her teeth. Mama Ginnie's yarns, even those we'd
heard a few times, brought lots of laughter.
The train came through twice a day. When it blew its whistle--that long,
low, billowing sound that echoed through the town--we started walking to
the post office. No pavement; we strolled along a well-worn footpath,
shaded by native trees. The mail always arrived before we did. Sometimes
we would be given money to go by the drug store and buy a Jo-Jo--an ice
cream bar on a stick, dipped in chocolate and covered with nuts. I
thought one could find them only in Somerville.
In the evenings Mama Ginnie took us around to visit with friends who
made us feel special. I remember Miss Rosie, her best friend, one block
over; Miss Ida, three doors down, who lived alone in a big house and
always sat on the front porch; and the Dunlaps, across the street, who
owned the jewelry store--they had no children and made a big fuss over
us.
Somerville smelled like no other place I've ever been. You never escaped
the penetrating odor of creosote, which the tie plant used to treat
crossties and other lumber. I never considered the odor offensive,
though. Indeed, in my memory, the sound, taste, and smell of Somerville
bring on warm nostalgia.
Annette G. Hollis
Plano, Texas
Published:
November 14,
2005
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