Grandma and Grandpa

My Grandmother, my father’s mother, was from Tennessee, and had all the earthiness of a hillbilly with a kindness and twinkle built in.  I didn’t see her often, since we lived in Montana and the trip to Tennessee took four days of hard driving, but we made the most of our few visits.  Grandma and Grandpa had a rambling house in Andersonville Pike, built on a slope with big deciduous trees up above and a creek down below.  The chicken house was on the slope above the house, and we’d slip and grab for trees as we went to gather eggs and dodge the rooster.

Grandma did everything in a relaxed, slow, kind of way, usually with a smile barely above a mischievous smirk.  Her biscuits were made for nearly every meal.  She’d make the dough, roll it out, cut the biscuits and bake them and then put the baked biscuits back in the bowl with the flour.  We’d always get flour on our noses or clothes when we ate them.  

Grandma was the overlarge pixie counterpoint to Grandpa, who was small and stern. Grandpa had had a hard life but came out intact and kind – something many who face hardship can’t do. He was born out of wedlock and lost his mother when he was just a kid. As an orphan he got into all kinds of trouble, but he righted himself and got a degree in chemistry and a teaching position. 

That was when he met my grandmother, a beautiful, clear-skinned southern girl with sparkling eyes. She was unimpressed by a mere teacher, so Grandpa got a medical degree, and Grandma agreed to marry him. The job he found was in Montana as a country doctor. Well, that was a bit of a wrench in the works for Grandma. It was finally agreed that she would move to Montana if it was agreed that when Grandpa retired, they would move back to Tennessee. And that’s what they did. 

As a country doctor in Montana, Grandpa made the rounds by car or horseback. In the winter when the snow piled up, he traveled in an old Model T he’d remade with a cat track on the back wheels and skis in front – sort of the first snowmobile. In his practice he saw people hit by trains, people attacked by coyotes, fevers, and all sorts of childbirth.  

My dad was Grandpa’s assistant, even as a kid.  He just did whatever Grandpa asked. After a leg amputation of a man run over by a train, Grandpa gave Dad the leg and told him to burn it.  Grandma seeing Dad carrying the leg and going to the cellar to the furnace said, “Albert, you’re not going to burn that thing in my furnace!  You bury that in the back yard!” It being winter and well below zero, the ground was frozen solid, but the leg went outside, not in the furnace. Eventually the coyotes probably got it.