My great-grandmother (aka Maw Maw) is still living, and she just celebrated another birthday on July 1st - her 105th birthday to be exact! We continue to be amazed by her longevity and enjoy spending time with her. She is my dad's dad's mom, so on Sunday, all nearby relatives on my dad's side got together to celebrate her birthday.
Have you ever seen 105 on a birthday cake before?
My dad helped introduce Shaelyn to her great-great-grandmother (can you believe that?!?!). She has not been so good at meeting new people recently...
...but she quickly caught on that this was someone important...
... and grew to admire her as much as we all do. What can I say? Once a mother, always a mother. Isn't this picture so sweet? I wish we could all live to see our great-great-grandchildren.
5 generations of women!From left to right:
my mom, Maw Maw, my grandmother (Ahma) holding Shaelyn, and me
Maw Maw grew up in Roswell, GA (just outside of Atlanta). I never met her husband (he died before I was born), but I remember wonderful summers spent in her house, sleeping in the bed with the window open for air (her old house didn't have air conditioning, of course), climbing the huge magnolia tree in the front yard, and playing baseball in the backyard with my dad. Maw Maw had a HUGE vegetable garden that she tended to alone, well into her 80's. We would help harvest vegetables and weed the garden when we would visit. She had a well on her land connected to her house, and an old smokehouse out back where she stored the tractor and where my great-grandfather had smoked all their meats. She lived on acres and acres of land out in the country. We would catch fireflies at night and play hide-and-seek in the fields behind the smokehouse with my cousins. My dad and Papa would fly model airplanes out in her fields far away from the house. She hung all her clothes to dry out on the clothes line in the backyard, so your towels and sheets always smelled country fresh. We had huge family reunions at her house every year for her birthday. When we were older and lived in Atlanta, we would have Sunday dinner at her house practically every Sunday after church. Maw Maw makes the best food you've ever eaten - true country cooking at it's finest. Dinner consisted of homemade biscuits, homemade jam, potatoes, green beans, creamed corn, butter beans, collard greens, tomatoes, onions, peppers, and shell peas - all fresh from the garden, as well as some kind of meat (and sometimes mutliple varieties): homemade fried chicken, roast beef, grilled pork chops. For desert, there was always a homemade cake (strawberry was my favorite), and her cookie jar was always full of Oatmeal Creme Cookies and Moon Pies. When we lived in Atlanta, we also spent more time at her house in the summer, harvesting the vegetables and prepping them for storage. It was at Maw Maw's house that I learned to shuck peas and butter beans, string string beans, cream corn, and how to freeze and can all these foods. We would also pick apples from her apple tree and make apple sauce and apple jelly. Her life was a life of simplicity and hard work, and I think that's why she's lived as long as she has. She no longer lives in that house in Roswell, and I miss visiting it and all the memories associated with it. In this modern world, I don't know too many people my age who can say that they truly connected with these things of the past while they were growing up. It was almost like I stepped into a time machine when I visited my Maw Maw. I remember visiting the house in Roswell right after I graduated from college. The whole city had built up around her. Right behind her land is a huge subdivision with homes that sell in the mid $500's. All around the house are shopping centers and things of modern convenience, but as soon as you turn the corner and come upon her dirt driveway, it's like turning back the pages of time - it truly looks like it doesn't belong. As much as I love living in a subdivision and shopping at Target and having the Internet, I am sad that my children will never really know what it's like to live in the country. They'll read about it in a book somewhere and ask me about it and I'll be able to tell them of all those carefree summers I spent as a little girl in Roswell, Georgia with my Maw Maw.
