Mimi, My Ordinary Grandmother, Part I

SC Family Memories

Growing up I seldom got to have interesting vacations like other kids did, like up at Blue Ridge, down at Myrtle Beach, or over at Santee. All we could afford was ordinary vacations, and as their firstborn grandchild I spent a lot of summers with my mother’s parents (D.W. and Marena Powers) on their farm outside of Florence.

Mother was a black-haired Irish beauty married to a handsome blue-eyed Englishman. Her parents were called Mimi and Da, nicknames for Grandma and Grandpa. I loved her, but Mimi was just an ordinary grandma. She was just under five feet tall and maybe weighed a hundred pounds. She had fair skin, twinkling brown eyes, and grayish-auburn hair never styled except for funerals when she let a neighbor give her a curl.

Bright and early in the mornings, Mimi put on an ordinary housedress that she’d hand-sewn herself from flower-printed feed sacks. Theirs…

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After Supper Activities

SC Family Memories

After-supper activities around our house in the 1950’s didn’t include video games, surfing the web, cell phones or i-pods, and very little television. It did include things like board games of Monopoly, Scrabble, Chinese or regular checkers.

Now, I was pretty good at Scrabble. After all, I was my class spelling champ, I studied words right along with math and geography. As long as my opponents were other kids I did just fine. But if Mama got into the game, she’d have to spot us so many points – she subscribed to crossword puzzle books!

Mama could use a handful of z’s and q’s and u’s to make the most outlandish combinations and we’d cry foul. “Look it up,” she’d say with a smile, totaling up her score. “Look it up.” Flipping through the pages of our oversize dictionary, we’d do our best to prove her wrong. Naturally she’d turn…

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