Can we long for someone we never knew?

Published 4:03 pm Sunday, July 17, 2016

I never met my grandmothers on either side of my family, yet I feel a longing for both of them.

Sometimes I see Granny Dykes just as in the stories Uncle Wayne told me. He was just a young boy when she died.

My life has been filled with tales of a diminutive woman with auburn hair who doted over babies with her tender touch and had enough spitfire to cuss out the pushy Avon lady or an inopportune chauvinist as needed.

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I know Victoria Ivy Dykes by the few black and white photos of her sitting on a grassy hillside and the memories my mama shared of them shopping downtown on Saturdays for new fashions to wear on Sundays at Dykes Chapel Church, that little red brick chapel my grandpa built and that bears our family name still today.

Wonderful stories were told of long rides along dirt roads in the wagon made better by homemade ice cream socials, gospel singing, and the scent of fresh hay waiting to be baled.

Daddy told me stories of Granny Creel, and hers was the one name that always brought tears to this tough man’s eyes.

As he sat me in his lap many times, I noticed a change, a softness in his voice as he kept her alive through memories of unbridled love, unwavering strength, and all the things that made a Southern lady immortal in an eldest son’s eyes.

She had coal black hair and high cheekbones indicative of her Native American roots, and she hoed the garden from sunrise to sunset.

I have never heard a story that did not center on tending babies, rearing children (13 to be exact) and cooking big suppers such as fried chicken, black-eyed peas, cornbread, and sweet potatoes every evening of her life.

A mother who chooses names like Trucine, Merlene, and Pauline for her children is a woman worth getting to know.

Many happy moments of my adulthood have been spent perusing antique stores, thrift shops and flea markets for comforting treasures that put me in the mindset of how it would have been at my grandmothers’ homes.

I get lost amidst vintage china teacups, delirious near Depression glass, and my heart flutters upon the discovery of an old mirror or Victorian parlor set. I am drawn to things that have a past.

Perhaps it’s my childlike imagination, a disciple of Peter Pan, but I find myself recreating stories with each piece. Maybe that cut glass vase found in a second hand shop last week in Monte Vista, Colorado, once held a nose gay of peonies from some grandmother’s garden.

Perhaps the tarnished silver tray discovered in a charming flea market in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will clean up nicely like it did once when given to someone’s grandmother on her 70th birthday.

Yes, I am sentimental, even a sentimental fool sometimes, but one my grannies would adore.

 

David Creel is a Mississippi native and a syndicated columnist. Reach him at beautifulwithdavid@gmail.com.