Shared Memories

 

Sitting on my front porch the other day reminded me of a recent conversation with my aunt, my mother’s youngest sister.  Janie and I are actually closer in age than she and my mom were.  I knew, because of old pictures, that she had spent time visiting on the farm when she was a child, even before I was born and before I have any memories.  I don’t remember why the topic of my grandmother, my daddy’s mother, came up in our conversation, but it led to reminiscences that startled me with their similarities.  I don’t know why it should have, except it just hadn’t registered with me that our times with Dixie Shouse were so close together.  Janie was only ten years old when I was born.

One afternoon, when we were working on the room that was my grandparents’ bedroom and is now my bedroom, we had the windows up while painting was going on.  There was a brisk breeze blowing across the bed, the same bed that has been in that room since before I can remember.  My daddy was born in that bed, I believe, and it could very well be that my granddaddy was born there too.  I sat down on the bed for a moment and had a flashback so strong that it almost took my breath away.  Nanny, as I called my grandmother, and I were stretched across the bed, purportedly taking a nap after dinner, which is what we called our midday meal.  Nanny almost always took a nap then.  It was a family tradition from her upbringing.  “After dinner, rest a while; after supper, walk a mile,” Tom Colley said, according to family lore.  Sometimes she rested on the couch, crossword puzzle in hand, and I can still see her there stretched out with her glasses on her nose and pencil in hand.  But the best times, for me, were the times we both lay across the bed, with the window up and the breeze drifting across our faces.

Janie said she remembered lying on that same bed with Nanny, who I think she called Miss Dixie, with that same window open.  “I used to climb out that window,” she told me, laughing.  She also talked about some little dolls my mama had given her and how Nanny would play dolls with her.  Nanny played with me too, but not so much with dolls because I was such a tomboy.  (Mama used to lament how she would buy all these pretty dolls for me and I preferred trucks and horses and my farm set.)  She read to me a lot, too, and I especially remember us laughing through the Raggedy Ann books. Everybody in the house read to me – I vividly remember my mama reading the Thornton Burgess Mother West Wind series. 

We shared other memories of Nanny that day. As seems to frequently happen, the memories mostly involved food.  Her lemon pie.  I can see her now, rolling out the crust with an old wooden rolling pin.  Her lemon pie was the best, and Janey remembers her Karo pie, which I only vaguely remember.  I have the recipes, worn and splattered, for both pies.  I have never had the courage to even try to make the lemon pie.  Janey said she has made both of them – she’s braver than I am where cooking is concerned. 

I have Nanny’s old pie pan, her rolling pin and her dough tray but my skills do not live up to their history. I would sooner try to fly to the moon as to attempt homemade pie crust.   Both Nanny and Mama made the best fruit pies.  They would roll out a great big crust, larger than the pan, fill it with blackberries, peaches, or cherries, then fold the extra crust over the filling and sprinkle sugar over the top.  There was always pie on the table at dinner.  Sometimes there was enough left over for supper.

I remember Nanny’s fudge – she would cook it on the stove in a big pan, checking to see if it was ready to pour by dropping a bit in a glass of water to see if it made a ball.  Then she would drop it on waxed paper by the spoonful.  It seemed to take forever for it to be cool enough to eat, but it was always worth the wait.  I don’t think I have that recipe; I’m not even sure she had one written down.  When I make fudge, I use a candy thermometer.  I never got the knack of using the glass of water.

The conversation with Janie made me think about shared memories and how special they are.  I had lunch with one of my cousins last spring, and I was telling her some family story.  “I’ve never heard that,” she said.  She suddenly got this sad look on her face and said, “I don’t have anybody to tell that to.”  Her parents are gone and she lost her only brother to Covid a couple years ago.  It struck me almost as a physical blow how sad it is when the people are gone that share your best memories.   I find myself thinking the same thing sometimes when something happen that I wish I could tell my mom and dad.  Brandi Carlile has a song with a line in it that says, “stories don’t mean anything if you got no one to tell them to.”  Sharing memories is almost as important as making memories.  I’m glad I still can do both.