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“Shelly, how do you want your eggs?” Grandma called from the kitchen. “Grandma, you know I don’t eat eggs,” I reply from the family room. I am watching the Lone Ranger on television, lying on my stomach on the orange naugahyde sofa. I am picking at one of the silver rivets just below the armrest. The sofa makes a sighing sound each time I put weight on a different part of the cushion. There are small metal disks with holes on the backs of the cushions to let the air whoosh out. The real kick is when the cousins come. We line up on the sofa and sit down simultaneously. When we make the loud noise, Grandma always stops her work to come tell us to, “Quit it.” My grandmother gets up at four in the morning, long before sun-up to beat the summer heat. I love getting up with her. The whole world is asleep, but us. She lets me watch television, as I shake off the sleepiness. The Lone Ranger is about the only show on that time of morning. The only show that would be of interest to me, anyway. Grandma usually does a load or two of laundry and hangs the clothes out on the line. She has a soda bottle filled with water, with the metal cap re-attached and tiny holes she punched in it with a nail. When the clothes are dry, she will sprinkle the ones that need ironing with water from the soda bottle, roll them tightly, and place them in the refrigerator. Grandma does not like ironing, so they will stay in there for a day or two. She puts them on the bottom shelf with her bottle of sugar-sweet red wine. She uses the clothes to conceal the wine, saying that the people at the Baptist church would talk, if they knew. She said her doctor told her to drink one glass of red wine every day for her heart. She does so just before bedtime, filling a glass that had once been a container for her snuff. Those glasses are everywhere holding pencils, hairpins, and clothespins. Grandma must have dipped a lot of snuff. “Well, I’ll make them, Shelly, and you try them,” Grandma says from the kitchen about the eggs. My grandmother is a paragon of patience. She sings every requested ditty with me and answers my constant questions. “Grandma, how come your sewing machine doesn’t plug in?” “If you move your feet faster on that thing will the sewing machine needle go faster?” She and I spent the day before making pickles, tending garden, and piecing a quilt. She does the cutting and sewing, but she lets me choose the fabric from a pile of scraps and often asks me to thread a needle for her. She is making quilts for my sister and me; the ‘Girls in Bonnets’ squares are ready to go into the quilting frame.
“Grandma, I smell something burning,” I say, never diverting my eyes from the masked cowboy on television. I’ve decided I Little Joe Cartwright better than the Lone Ranger. He’s cuter. Little Joe’s curls look like my Barbie’s hair. That is, before I cut it into a “Dorothy Hamill.” Grandma was sewing when I brought her the shorn Barbie. She and I both laughed and then I sat to watch her create art with fabric. The sewing machine doesn’t need electricity. She gets it going by giving the round knob on the end of the machine a tug with her hand and then her feet start pumping on the treadle. The needle bobbs up and down linking scraps into a little girl wearing a sun bonnet. I told her how I thought the machine was ‘neat’. She said, “Honey, some day when I’m gone, this old Singer will be yours.” A commercial comes on the television and my focus turns to the acrid smell coming from the kitchen. “Grandma, those eggs are burning,” I insist. Still facing the television, I place one leg on the floor and stand. I stick to the sofa and have to peel parts of my sweaty body from the orange material. As I turn, I see smoke coming from the skillet. I walk toward the stove to pull it from the burner and glimpse my grandmother. She is stretched out on the floor by the back door. I race and call to her, “Grandma!” “Grandma, get up!” I shout, as I tug on her arm. She does not move nor open her eyes. “Momma, Help!” I shout with urgency. My mother is in another part of the house, packing to go home. I look down and notice that Grandma has a sun bonnet in her hand. I lift it from her clutch and find the chin ties are wedged under her. I pull on them. It seems like a magician’s scarf trick and they will never stop coming. When I hear Momma’s bare feet smacking on the hardwood, I abandon the bonnet. I avoid looking back down at Grandma and look instead at my mother running toward me. I know that the bottoms of Momma’s feet must be black with dirt, because the fronts of her toes are dirty. There is a lumber mill across the highway and black cinders blow over from the mill’s incinerators and coat everything. When Grandma tells us she can grow tomatoes between our toes, we know it is time for a bath. We always leave a black ring in the bathtub. Grandma says that the cinders make a mess, but they are good for her garden. “Oh, my okra and snap beans just keep coming,” she reports. “Those cinders make the soil so rich.” “That and chicken manure make a good garden,” she explains. “Mother!” Momma gasps, when she sees her mother on the floor. She then instructs me to go next door for help. When I return, I can tell from my mother’s demeanor that my grandmother is gone. I stay next to Grandma until the ambulance comes and takes her away. Ripped Seams A few weeks after we lost my grandmother, different relatives came for items that were special to them. The aunts and uncles told stories about their parents and events connected to the pieces of furniture they took home. “Shelly, is there anything of Grandma’s you would like to have?” I was asked. Looking over at the sewing machine, I said nothing. The quilt pieces for my sister and me were on a table nearby and I motioned that I would like to have those. Cousin Portia Taylor was given the Singer sewing machine. She was an accomplished seamstress and everyone was amused with the play on words with her last name. I thought about telling the family that Grandma had promised me the Singer and even felt guilty that I might be refusing her gift by not speaking up. But I never said anything because I knew the magic was not in the machine. The magic was in watching my grandmother’s kinetic motion and from being beside her when she laughed and sang with me. I do not have the sewing machine, but I do carry a ‘singer’ in my memory. It is my grandmother’s voice chiming in with me to a chorus of “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat”.
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