My Grandmother

I was reminded recently of a trick I played on my grandmother when I was young. I was about 10 and I found one of those white, cardboard jewelry boxes. It was the kind that inexpensive jewelry comes in. I cut a small hole in the bottom of the box. I put dirt all over one of my fingers and placed the finger through the hole, holding the box in the same hand. I placed the lid back on the box and walked next door to my grandmother’s house. I showed her the box and said, “Look what I found in your garden.” I took off the lid and it looked like there was a detached dirty finger in the box. “Go throw that thing out.” She said, as if it was perfectly normal to find a human finger in the garden, but I just shouldn’t be playing with it.


My grandmother always had good advice. “Don’t swallow your gum. Your guts will stick together.” “Watch out for bats, they will try to fly into your hair.” It never occurred to me to ask why a bat wanted to hang out in my hair. Whenever she happened upon a snake while working in the yard, she always took a garden hoe and chopped it into small pieces. She then carefully carried each piece of the snake to the road, balancing it on the hoe. She made sure to spread them far apart. That way cars would run over the pieces and squish them, and the snake pieces couldn’t grow back together.

My grandparents were married for over 50 years and as far as I know it was a good marriage. However, every time a car would go by decorated for a wedding and beeping it’s horn, she would say, “Damn fools.”