When I was coming up, I was fortunate enough to have Viola. She was my grandma and we called her Grandma Vi. She was a tough lady who was born during the great depression. She told us how she and her 10 brothers and sisters only got one pair of shoes and a roll of duct tape a year. By the end of the year, their shoes were more duct tape than leather. I suppose that’s why as an adult, she had so many strappy sandals that she could never wear them out.
She drove a metallic blue 1971 Mustang with an all-white leather interior. She would put 3 or 4 phone books in the front bucket seat so I could see over the dashboard when we went to the Eagle department store. We would sit at the sandwich counter and drink root beer floats and buy clothes for my Barbie. More importantly, we would go back to her house and GARDEN. Pull weeds and plant seeds. She didn’t grow many edible plants like I do now, but that lady had a green thumb for landscaping and indoor plants. We spent so much time pruning the babies off her air plants and talking about how important they were to help clean the air. We would work all afternoon until the sun went down.
She was employed as an artist at the Shell Factory in North Fort Myers, FL, so she had bags and bags of different colored sea shells that we could use as poker chips at night when playing cards. She let me “taste how nasty beer is” so I never got an addiction to it (I can’t stand it) and her marriage advice was to make sure to find “the right stallion to hitch my wagon to”. I cannot even express how much I learned from this tiny, badass woman, from her mistakes as much as her accomplishments. She told me that if I ever wanted to succeed, plant a seed. They want to live and grow and all I have to do is help them along the way. That has stuck with me my whole life.
Another amazing woman in my life was a huggable elderly black lady named OlaMae. I was a teenager with a fresh driver’s license and she was one of my best-friends grandmas who needed someone to drive her around. This would have been in backwoods Florida in the early 80s and you just did not see a white girl and a black lady driving around together. It wasn’t accepted, moreso from her community than mine. But ya know what, we did not give two hoots what the men who gathered at the corner by her house thought about a skinny white girl pulling up to pick up Grandma. They wondered why I cared about her, wondered why I dare get out of my car, wondered why I helped her in the garden. I always wondered why they weren’t helping her!
OlaMae told me she had helped deliver most of those men. She lived in a community far from any hospital and where there was no money for having babies with doctors. In the 60s and 70s, she had a room in her house set up where the women would come when they were ready to deliver. In fact, she said one rainy night, two women showed up and one had to deliver over a bucket while the other had the twin bed. This woman never had a lick of medical training! And her small garden was a bountiful, lush oasis that she had started so she could make meals for the new moms who came to her. Even when she got older, she kept a garden that quite honestly puts mine to shame. She had a shovel, a rake, a hoe, and a pail for kitchen scraps. She taught me that you have to keep feeding the garden throughout the growing season and even in the fallow seasons. The garden is alive and it’s hungry! She didn’t know the word “compost”, but she knew what to do from sheer necessity, being poor and in dire need. Some desperate people think up ways to better themselves by committing crime, she bettered herself by bettering others with the ground she walked on. I remember her gray hair, pulled up in a bun and her big smile when she talked about her garden. Those tomatoes, onions, peppers, watermelon, squash, beans, and greens were HER babies.
I lost my granny in 2003 but I feel her pushing me when the times get tough. She had a tough life and seemed to always rise to challenges instead of shrinking back. What helped her through was getting her hands in the dirt and creating an environment that counteracted all the drunken fights with my grandpa and long hours working inside a building all day. Making things grow was about more than pretty flowers or coconuts from the palm trees. It was about making life better.
Now that I am a newly-minted 40-something Grandma, I wish my granny was here for Ms. Paisley, my new granddaughter. She’d be a butt-kickin 103 yr old, but her wisdom and knowledge would still be teachable and relevant. OlaMae would also be over a hundred, probably closer to 120. But she would teach Paisley how to overcome any obstacle no matter your situation in life….. but ya know what, I’m here. And I will have to act on Vi and OlaMae’s behalf to teach a younger set of folks how to turn dirt into food and how to cope. How to raise animals, save water, save seeds, turn scraps into compost, and survive the hard times when you just don’t think you can make it through. I’ve been there and had to depend on what the older women taught me to survive. Use your wits, don’t panic, and always be thinkin several steps ahead. Have a cash stash, have a seed collection, and don’t put any of it in the thievin bank because then you lose control over the two things you need to survive. And above all, pray on your knees, then get off them and work!
Ms. Paisley may only be 3 days old, but I have plans for that little lady. And I hope everybody that reads this blog will take some time each week to teach a youngster something practical. How to sew, how to can and preserve, how to hunt and fish, how to butcher, how to save money, how to save rainwater, how to acquire land debt free, how to grow food, how to read a map, how to tell time without a watch, how to start a campfire and cook over it, how to navigate a forest, how to navigate a city, how to stay the heck away from credit cards and student loans, how to weld, how to defend yourself, how to build with wood, how to bake, reapect your elders, how to pick good friends who are GOOD PEOPLE no matter their skin color, how to shut off the waste of your life TV and go outside! I am calling on ALL adults to be someone’s Viola and OlaMae. And that right there is how you make THIS PLANET GREAT AGAIN.
