Share your memories and advice from your grandparents here!

[Beekissed]

I have very strong memories of my grandmother and her house, though she wasn't an overly loving type granny. She had a fun streak and her house was so interesting, a little spooky and never dull for us. She had foods we didn't have at home, barns full of hay in which to play, cows, farm cats, chickens...you name it, she had it.

It would take forever to relate the impressions of my granny's home! It was the first place I tasted pickled corn, rhubarb skinned, salted and eaten raw, watched someone milk a cow, hunted for nightcrawlers in a pasture, took a hayride....all the things that leave the deepest impression on a young mind when you think of old-fashioned and farming.

She had a horrible upbringing, a terrible married life, escaped to a better life, raised several kids by herself for awhile until she met my step-grandfather. She was tough, a hard worker, humorous...not your typical cookie-baking grandma. She liked running black Angus cattle on her farm just for the way they looked on her pasture!

She could kill a chicken quick as a wink, wasn't a particularly good cook, had a room with strange and wonderful things on the shelves....one was a wolfman in a cage, a board game about vampires, a huge stuffed purple cow, a turkey's foot on a board, hundreds of porcelain animals.

She had a set of stairs to the upper portion of her house that was on wheels...pulled away from the wall, could be turned around and inserted into the same wall and locked away. When this was done there would be a door all by itself up on a wall....very weird and spooky house. The kitchen floor rolled like a roller coaster and her bathroom always smelled strongly of Dove soap.

I loved to go to grandma's house and hated to leave. She was still building oak swings when she was in her 80s, still climbing onto ladders for projects and had a little log cabin built on her property so she could go out there and sit by her little woodstove.

She was unique and I'll never forget her.

 

[Wannabefree]

My grandma had a hornets nest full of hornets up at the eave of her outbuilding which to this very day I have never been in. Grandma was/is a hoarder. Nobody has been in that old building in 30 years...bet there is a plethora of craziness between those walls! Probably old cast iron stuff, and no telling what all. grandma loved to go to auctions before she went nearly completely blind about 25 years ago. We have a rare debilitating eye disease that runs in our family. Grandma and 3 of my aunts and uncles have/had it. My grandma is weird, but fun. I should go see her, hope she has a place cleaned out where I can sit this time. I once had hard candy that was about 30 years older than me from WWII rations thanks to my grandmas hoarding abilities It was in a tin can with a rusty screw top....it's a miracle I am still alive! Best darn lemon drops I ever tasted

 

[Henrietta23]

I wish I had learned more. All 3 of the grandparents I knew were born in the early 1900s. All had chickens and sometimes other animals at some point. But at the time I knew them I never knew it would be information I'd want someday! I did learn some from my mother's grandfather. He had a huge vegetable garden. I learned from him that sometimes the old ways don't need improvement. So if you've been gardening a certain way all your life and it's working, maybe the next greatest gadget isn't something you really need. He also was an avid journal keeper. From him I learned that words written down can be hurtful even after you're gone. None applied to me, but my uncle has been going through the journals and found some pretty harsh stuff. His garden journals though are another story. Since seeing his I've kept garden logs of plans and what worked etc.
From my mother's mother I inherited an addiction to pocket books. My mother did too. We seem to be on an eternal quest for the perfect bag. Haven't found it or made it yet. But we're never ready to admit it doesn't exist....
My father's mother is someone I could have learned so much from if I'd taken the time to sit and talk to her.

 

[FarmerChick]

no great farm type lessons learned from the grandparents

Mom's dad was a coal miner in PA and grandma ran a general store...yea she farmed, raised chickens etc...but that was nothing to do with "wanting to be SS" lol it was survival...period

Mom--she said she hated any type of SS stuff, as soon as she hit 18 off to Washington to work for the Navy and never grew a tomato again in her life...and she hates animals basically lol she wanted out of the hard life

Dad's family were farmers in the beginning. His parents sold off land during the depression to survive and went into factory work. Again, Dad said NOPE to any farming...lol he hated the team of horses and the funny story he would tell about those 2 nasty nags...I think Daisy and Debbie (or some crazy names like that lol) When he was 16 he signed himself into the Marines and never looked back either.

I think the older folks HAD to basically live like that and then the technology age hit and you truly didn't have to "do" most of your own work...you know, get a job and buy it from someone else lol yea my parents ran straight for that type of life. worked out well for me tho...I didn't have to work hard at all as a kid and I sure loved that

 

[savingdogs]

I think people from that era were very industrious and hard working compared to now. Both my grandma and my mom went through the depression and it affected them both greatly. They both became tightwads! But the tendency served them well. I do not come from a frivolous family.

All of our gadgets and convenience items have not necessarily made us any wiser, that is for sure. But I don't think I'd want to give up my high efficiency washer and my indoor plumbing, or go back to the days of horse and buggy.

My grandma actually gave birth in her own house in her own bedroom. My mom showed me the house, it still exists. I cannot imagine going through childbirth without assistance other than my mom or a good friend!

 

[kcsunshine]

Both sides of my family lost their family homes to TVA dams, so I guess you could call me a water baby since my parents probably wouldn't have met if lakes hadn't taken their homes.

My maternal grandfather was an excellent carpenter, was once a muleskinner, and managed to get a college education. My maternal grandmother had no formal education, but read her Bible every day. She was born left handed but in those days some thought that was bad luck and she was forced to write with her right hand. She never learned to drive (or at least she never did drive) and Papaw always bought groceries on his way home from work. He built the house they lived in and the older part was put together with pegs instead of nails. He had a John Deere tractor that had a huge pulley belt that ran his corn mill and his big round saw. I'll always remember watching him use that tractor and hearing its "put, put, put, put, pow, pow" as it ran. Papaw built a corn crib out of hewn logs with cracks wide enough to put your arm through. He kept a black racer snake in the crib to keep rats and mice out of the corn. He and that snake would chase each other out in the yard. Mamaw hated it and one day killed it. I guess that's the only lie she ever told him when she said she didn't know what happened to it. My job when I was there was to put the dried ears of corn through the sheller to get corn for the chickens. I also gathered the eggs out of the various nest Mamaw had set up for them. They were all in different places.

 

[Wannabefree]

I keep remembering funny stuff about my grandma now. She takes chickens to church. She had 3 she kept in the house and gave them a bath in the sink twice a week. All the kids(aunts and uncles) argued that she shouldn't have them in the house, but grandma didn't listen, she kept those birds anyway. The kids at church loved it when she brought them.

 

[ORChick]

FarmerChick wrote

I think the older folks HAD to basically live like that and then the technology age hit and you truly didn't have to "do" most of your own work...you know, get a job and buy it from someone else lol

I remember a British comedy series called "To The Manor Born" - It had to do with an upper crust English lady who had to sell her large house and estate, but still lived nearby, and all the situations she got into with the nouveau riche new owner. In one episode she was buying groceries, and one of her former estate employees was also at the store. The former rich lady asked him why he was buying frozen vegetables when, as an estate employee, he had access to fresh grown from the estate garden? His answer was that he was paid well enough now (implication being that he had not been when she was his employer) that he could afford "store bought", and didn't have to resort to eating stuff from the garden *like poor people*. Those aren't direct quotes, just the gist. I think that is often the thinking of people coming up from *working class* or *poverty*; "now I have money; now I don't have to do those *lack of money* things". It takes a generation or two to realise that they maybe threw the baby out with the bathwater.

 

[abifae]

All of our gadgets and convenience items have not necessarily made us any wiser, that is for sure. But I don't think I'd want to give up my high efficiency washer and my indoor plumbing, or go back to the days of horse and buggy.

Exactly!!! I love technology. It's wonderful how much stuff we have access to. I just don't see why we cannot do it hand in hand with being healthy, having gardens, living more off the land. People really seem to view it either-or and I don't think it is a binary computation.

 

[savingdogs]

I am really enjoying this thread, and I do think we have thrown out the baby with the bathwater in not paying enough attention to our grandparents.

I think when technology advanced and sometimes our grandparents were slow to understand it, we tended to disregard their wisdom (I'm talking as a culture, not me personally). As if what applied to their lifetimes did not apply to ours. Hah! All the old rules apply, it just got more complicated.

My grandma very much used what she had handy for cooking or whatever, didn't run to the store all the time. She devised and made things. She had a lemon tree so lemon pie was her standard. She had an orange tree so she gave a box of oranges to everyone at Christmas (they were the best oranges too!). Things didn't come from the store in her house, they came from her busy hands.