On Grandma's Porch Read online

  Mrs. Kate read on with the words first of the mother who wished the living child divided and then with the words of the mother who begged King Solomon to give the child to the other mother rather than harm the baby. Once more the boy, speaking as King Solomon, read the King’s words from verse 27 as he laid the intact watermelon on the table. “Give her the living child, and in no wise slay it: she is the mother thereof.”

  We all let out sighs of relief, as we realized that King Solomon had used God’s gift of wisdom and understanding to reconcile the situation. Mrs. Kate then led us in prayer, thanking God for all blessings.

  Mrs. Kate thanked the boy who played King Solomon’s part, and then she got out some cookies and juice for a quick snack before we left to find Granny and Granddaddy and go into the big sanctuary for the worship service. She told us we could pick up the watermelon after church, but we agreed that Granddaddy would want her to keep it and enjoy it. From that day forward, eating watermelon took on a whole new meaning for me.

  It was during the snack time that I realized my embroidered bookmark was missing. I frantically looked around the room and scanned the tables, but no bookmark. I asked my cousins whether they had seen the bookmark, but no one seemed to know anything about it. I sat through the worship service thinking only of my loss, and how I would ever get the bookmark back again. Riding in the back of the truck back to the farm, I asked my older cousin if she had any suggestions.

  “Oh, we’ll be going back next Sunday cause we’re staying one more week. At least you and I will stay another week. We’re not homesick like the younger cousins. They’ll probably go on home with their parents this afternoon.”

  “Do you think the bookmark will turn up next Sunday?”

  “Well, it’s a possibility. Ask Granny about it. She’ll know what to do.”

  I took my cousin’s suggestion and talked to Granny about the problem. She said she would call Mrs. Kate and ask her if she noticed the bookmark left in the room after Sunday school. After their phone conversation, Granny said that Mrs. Kate didn’t know anything about the bookmark, but she had an idea that it would turn up the following week.

  That afternoon, Mama and Daddy came to the farm to visit, along with my aunts and uncles, who were the other cousins’ parents. I assured Mama and Daddy that I wanted to stay one more week, but I didn’t tell Mama about the missing bookmark. I was too embarrassed. I made Granny promise not to tell Mama, because I hoped to find the bookmark during the next Sunday church meeting.

  We all went outside under the big pecan trees to have some watermelon together before the relatives who were planning to leave got on their way back home. Granddaddy had chosen a huge, elongated, striped watermelon for the afternoon treat. We sat down at the picnic tables in the shade of the pecan trees; the adults sat at one table, and we children sat at the other one. We watched as Granddaddy prepared to split the watermelon. As he cut into the melon’s flesh, I thought about King Solomon and his wish for an understanding heart rather than riches and material things. I appreciated my family in a special way on that afternoon as we ate the juicy, sweet melon.

  I knew that Mrs. Kate had wanted us children to grasp this lesson of the heart from the Bible so that we would remember it as we grew older. She got her wish as far as I was concerned. To this day, I think about King Solomon every time I eat watermelon. We cousins even acted out the motions of those verses every summer after that one for years when we picked and ate Granddaddy’s watermelons.

  The following Sunday it was just my older cousin and I who made it back to church with Granny and Granddaddy. The younger cousins decided one week was long enough away from home. We greeted Mrs. Kate, telling her that this Sunday would be our last one with her until the next summer because we would be going home later that afternoon. She hugged us and said that she was certainly glad we had come to Sunday school.

  I sat down next to my cousin at one of the tables, as we got ready to sing, “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy, down in my heart.” It was at that moment that I saw the little blond girl grinning and playing with my bookmark as she sang along. At first, I wanted to reach across the table and grab my bookmark away from her right then and there, and I almost did it, too. At the end of the song, Mrs. Kate told us to get our Bibles ready for the weekly sword drill.

  As we stood up with our Bibles to participate in the drill, I whispered to the little blond girl, “That’s my bookmark you took last Sunday, but maybe you need it more than I do. Maybe God wants me to give it to you to help you with your Bible lessons. If you really want it and need it, you can have it. I think my Mama will understand if I explain it to her, since she embroidered it.”

  The little blond girl burst into tears and ran out of the room right as we began singing. When she came back later, she handed the bookmark back to me, and said she was sorry she took it. I looked at Mrs. Kate, and she nodded at me as she read on through our lesson in the Bible. I was learning how to get through to the heart of things.

  How Did People Survive...

  Before there were fast food restaurants?

  “Grandmother would always make a little “snack lunch” for us grandchildren so we could get all the way home without having to ask Mama and Daddy to stop along the way for a snack. She would put in the box (usually an empty animal crackers circus box with the elephants, tigers, and bears painted on there) all of my favorite “eats,” like peanut butter crackers or whatever she had on hand that day. Most of all, her love was packed in there for me and I knew it! I couldn’t wait to visit again!”

  When music was printed on vinyl albums you played on record players?

  “Actually, I owned many of the old 78s as well as the 45 rpms! I have vivid memories of dancing around my childhood bedroom in Atlanta to the vibes of ‘Davy, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ I distinctly remember hiding under the bed just before the wolf growled at Grandma! My cousin and I sometimes danced and sang along in her family’s garage with her recording of ‘Does your Chewing Gum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight . . . ?’ Those were the days.”

  When watching a movie meant going to a drive-in theater?

  “I remember Mama dressing me in my pajamas and settling me into the back seat of our 1951 Plymouth many a time as she and Daddy and I headed off to our neighborhood drive-in for movie entertainment. Hiding in the back seat under my blanket was especially convenient when I got too scared of scenes from movies like the Hounds of the Baskervilles! I would always fall asleep part-way through the movie.”

  —Lynda Holmes, Getting To The Heart Of The Watermelon

  Ants Gotta Bite, Sun Gotta Burn

  by Julia Horst Schuster

  “Well, they’re Southern people, and if they know you are working at home they think nothing of walking right in for coffee. But they wouldn’t dream of interrupting you at golf.”

  —Harper Lee

  Queen Esther Ashcraft Gaston was my grandmother’s name, and she lived up to its loftiness, certainly not in wealth or social stature, but in the richness she passed down to her wisdomless clan. I fancied her a royal, but she was far from stuck on herself. She was genteel and kind, with a unique way of humbling herself to mingle with us “relative” commoners who needed someone to teach us what was what.

  My family always visited her in the summertime, usually during the month of July, when the humidity in Deland, Florida was at its peak and could suck streams of perspiration out of you, drenching your shirt and underdrawers in nothing flat. I remember those visits as some of the happiest days of my young life. All except one summer, that is.

  Oh, I must have been about five or six years old. Our pea-green, 1959 Chevrolet Impala Estate station wagon crunched along the shell road toward Granny’s house. We’d been driving since midnight. I couldn’t wait to get out of the car and away from my brothers—John, who relished torment
ing me, his baby sister, to the point of making me scream or tickling me to the point of wetting my pants—and Arthur, who had just reached puberty and had not yet learned the advantages of deodorant.

  Once a week did not cut it, and ninety-five degree heat only made the fumes rise faster to my nose. The boys hogged the back seat; I was sandwiched in the middle and never allowed to “claim” the window seat. How did our parents ever survive those trips without Nintendo, DVDs or at the very least, CDs or cassettes? Better yet, how did I ever survive them?

  Before our tires came to a complete stop in front of Granny’s house, I vaulted over John and forced open the car door, eager to escape the stale air. I jumped out with sandaled feet, and without noticing the ant mound. It took a few seconds for my travel-numb limbs to react to the bites, but when the pain hit, my siren wailed.

  A regiment of tiny red soldiers charged up my legs and into my shorts. They covered my lower extremities in a matter of seconds; even got into my panties. My white flesh turned angry red from the six-legged poison machines. I howled. I kicked, goose-stepping, and squealed, searching around frantically for something to rub up against.

  With me dashing about like a Comanche meeting the warpath head-on, Mother had a dickens of a time catching me after she clambered from the car. “Julia, be still!” she yelled. She slapped at my legs with her headscarf. Daddy cursed. Even John and Arthur chipped in to beat off the little buggers. I’d never been so happy for a whipping. But fire ants fight to the death. They were not giving up.

  By the time Granny heard the ruckus and made her way from out back near the fern-packing shed—she grew and sold the kind of ferns used in floral arrangements—to the front porch, I had hundreds of bites from my waist to my feet. Granny snatched me up and dashed to the side of the house, where she dropped me into the rain barrel, pushing my head below the surface with great force. Green algae choked me and got sucked up my nose. But when I came up, gasping, I was thankful and certain that my queen had saved me from a horrible death.

  “Just sit right there and let the water soothe you,” she said. “I’ll fetch the salve, and I’ll be right back.”

  She disappeared around back of the house, unfazed and unruffled. I wondered how she had managed to remain so calm. Royal blood, I figured. She hadn’t screamed, “Lord, have mercy, my baby, my baby,” like Mother had. She had just acted, swiftly and with total control of her senses. I had known and loved this woman my whole life, but only then did I realize she was a woman to be admired.

  I did okay for a few seconds, just bobbing there in the barrel, the water cool on my burning legs. Then I realized that I was alone on the side of a house so eerie and mysterious it took me weeks to overcome the nightmares that followed me home. It didn’t exactly resemble a castle. A rundown old Florida homestead was more like it, sitting on cinder blocks and listing slightly to the left. Live oaks dripping with Spanish moss domed the property. Their shadowy crown added a horror flick atmosphere that fueled the imagination of this grandchild ripe for suspense. Their shade was essential for Granny’s Plumosus fern business, but to me the gloom concealed monsters who lurked under the blades, waiting to jump out at the next passerby or the next child left alone in a rain barrel.

  I screamed.

  Where had the rest of my family gone? Had they all been attacked by the biting varmints? Were they out front in a battle with the tiny foe? Or what if . . . what if . . . what if the fern monsters had gotten them and eaten them all up?

  “Aheeeeee!”

  “Julia? Julia!” Finally my mother’s voice came to me from someplace above. I looked up and found her. She stood inside the screened porch, her face pressed against the mesh. “Oh, baby girl, are you okay? I’d come down there but those critters are everywhere. This place is crawling with them, just like it always was when I was a child.”

  “I want out,” I wailed.

  My mother was scared out of her wits. I could tell by the way she scanned the ground around me. I could tell by the way her hands rubbed her arms as if she were cold. What other reason could keep her away from me in my time of need? I had never witnessed her in such a state. It caused me to pause in my pain and wonder how itsy-bitsy red bugs could wield the power to cause such a horrible thing—a mother paralyzed with fear.

  But fear is contagious. I caught it and quaked. “I can’t get out. I want out. I want out NOW! It hurts, Mother, it hurts soooooo bad.” Tears rolled as my agony recharged. Green slime and imaginary water beasts threatened to gag me again.

  “It’s okay, doodle bug, just hold on. Granny will be right back with the salve, quick as a minute. She’s immune to those dad-blamed creatures. They gave up on her long ago. But she’ll fix you up like she always did me.”

  Thankfully, Mother was right. Granny reappeared and lifted me from the muck. And for a woman of close to eighty, she was one strong broad. But now, slime dripping from my toes was the least of my worries. The air hit my bites like a thousand needles. I started yelling and I didn’t quit until a dose of paregoric kicked in.

  The next few days remain a blur to me. I guess doping me out of my mind was easier than listening to me lament like a captive damsel in distress. When I finally recovered, I had major catching up to do. My brothers had already been to Silver Springs to ride the glass bottom boat, see the mermaids, and marvel at the human pyramids of championship water skiers who dazzled the crowds there seven days a week. Plus, they’d been down the St. John’s River fishing with Uncle John A. I had missed out on everything. This vacation was from hell. I was cranky and bite pimpled, and it was time for high-style Julia pampering. I deserved better than this.

  When Daddy carried me to the car, (because I refused to place my feet anywhere near the ground) I sported a pity-party attitude that I was certain would gain me extra trinkets at the local souvenir store. Boy, was I wrong. Granny didn’t react kindly to emotional blackmail. I was lucky to get to go to the beach, or so I thought.

  Daddy drove and Granny rode shotgun. “Daytona, here we come!” Granny rattled off directions, pointing left, and then right while I sat in amazement in my usual spot in the middle of the back seat. This was a curious thing, I thought, a first in my five-year old history. No one had ever told my daddy where to go. But there he sat in the driver’s seat, quietly following Queen Esther’s commandments, and never raising his bushy left eyebrow or grumbling under his mustache.

  Normally, I thought of Granny as a vanilla woman, who wore only regal shades of gray, beige and white. She had Clorox-white hair, braided and coiled into a crown on top of her head, as cottony soft as my pillowcase. I recall her as if she were perpetually seated in a black and white photo, even when she was right there before me in the flesh, with sepia shades being the boldest her personality could muster up. But here, in her domain, Granny took on an air of authority that she could have never pulled off in Memphis on her visits to see us. She spoke and everyone listened. With words delivered with a smile and in a quieter-than-normal tone, her meaning came across with clarity and kid glove force.

  At the beach she said, “Julia Elisa, come here and let me slather on this here Coppertone.” I wrinkled up my nose, but obeyed. “Your momma and John A. will be comin’ to git me real soon. I can’t stay out here with y’all an’ bake all day. I got work to git done back at home. Those ferns gotta be cut, packed an’ shipped today. But you mind my words, now, young’un’—in a little while you’re to put on this here shirt your daddy brought, and sit here underneath this umbrella so’ens you don’t get scorched. Don’t forget, now, or those bites will come back to life and have you ruby red and wailing all over again.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I replied, taking no mind.

  By bedtime the blisters rose. My shoulders puffed up with a septic ocean boiling just below the skin. Hot red, I couldn’t sit, I couldn’t stand, and I certainly could not lie down. There was no position of comfort, no salve that
could ease the pain. Granny cut five stalks from the aloe vera plant, smeared me up good and prayed to the Lord Almighty that I’d get some relief. Then it was once again time to bring on the dope. Mixed with peanut butter to kill the taste, Mother spooned paregoric down me, and before long oblivion took me to a place of tormented dreams, fern monsters and fire ants bigger than the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz.

  The next morning—as I awakened from sitting straight up all night on my cot in the corner of the dining room—I overheard my brothers discussing how Daddy had just stood there and taken it when Granny reamed him up one wall and down the other for not watching out to make sure I didn’t get charbroiled at the beach. First taking directions, and now a good reaming out? This woman, Queen Esther Granny, must have some kind of power to accomplish all of that in these few short days, I thought.

  A few more miserable days of healing passed. They seemed to go on forever. I was not a happy camper, but I knew better than to moan too much. I was bored out of my mind but reluctant to leave the house. It seemed that the out-of-doors that had once been my playground now held painful dangers my young years had never experienced before. I started to understand why my mother seemed so jumpy. I was more than just jumpy. I was ready to bolt.

  Arthur came into the kitchen one afternoon in search of some needle-nosed pliers to fix his fishing line. I was helping Granny make fried chicken for dinner. It had taken all I could muster to stand on the back porch and watch her swing that poor bird by the neck till it was dead. I was a city girl. I had never seen anything so tragic. Now, I stood across the room while she chopped the creature to bits. My stomach churned just a little, but I managed to choke it down.

  I guess she figured a little cooking would keep me occupied since I had run out of things to play with and had refused to set foot off the porch for fear of another ant attack. After all, those little varmints knew I was there and that I tasted good. They were sure to come back for course number two of me.