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Kind'a cool ... well, to ME anyway. (Thump post, sorry)
My grandmother was a cool lady and passed away in 1995. She was in her 90's, but nobody actually knew how old she REALLY was. The story goes, my grandfather was younger than her and she lied about her age to make the marriage "more appropriate" for the times, so she may have been older. I don't know if official records existed or not, but as far as we know, she was born in 1904 on a rural farm in Georgia. I never knew my grandfather (mom's side) as I was told he was crossing the street one day and was hit and killed by a truck. Granny was left with 4 kids (2-boys, 2-girls) to raise on her own, kind of a tough feat in the 30's-40's. As I said above, she was born on the farm and had to help run the family business and only had a sixth-grade education. She was a strong woman and after my grandfather was killed, she opened her own beauty shop. It did well and she eventually had a space in a major department store in downtown Orlando. Right after the war, she had her own house built which is where she still lived until her death. (my uncle, her last remaining child, now owns it) She went the way I'd like to go. She was living alone at home, still caring for herself and worked in her garden every day. One day, she went out to lunch (one of her favorite restaurants) with my aunt and just keeled over, dead in her chair during the meal. No illness, no suffering, just here one minute, gone the next.
Well, my uncle received the house in her will and boxed everything up to put in storage as he fixed the place up and rented it out. That stuff eventually made it to a shed at my mom's house. When my mom died, we had an estate sale and dug through those boxes to rescue old family photos, etc, but it was mostly dishes and nick-nacks, etc. Most of the family had already snagged whatever momentos they wanted years ago. Well, in one of those boxes I found an old cutting board I'd made for my grandmother in 7th grade shop class. It is made with alternating hardwood strips of oak and walnut. It's pretty cool that it has obviously been well used and she even wrote an inscription on the back. Again, she had very little formal education and her spelling was a bit rough. She even misspelled my first (I spelled it with a "Y") AND last name (2-"B's") but that was Granny. She always did things her way and it was always accepted by all. Well, here's the front and back of my new "heirloom". (I may pass it on to my son) Why she switched from printing to cursive is anybody's guess, but we never questioned anything Granny did, we just loved her for who she was.
Note: Since my grandfather, my dad and I have the same name, I grew up as "Little Jimmy".
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