Simplicity looks like Jesus, so today I attempt to paint for you in words the woman who showed me what Jesus was like.
What Simplicity Looks Like
Every Friday or Saturday, Granny went to the beauty stop. She was a glorified white head by the time she was 18, and every bit of it was a “crown of glory gained by a righteous life.” If I was lucky, I went with her. Ms. Judy would cut my hair or if I was unfortunate, perm it, and Granny would get a brush and brush out her hair, for she always let me go first. PaPa would drop us off; Granny didn’t drive. I sat in the front of the shop and browsed magazines and traipsed through the shop begging for money for a Coca-Cola in the machine in the back. Or I ran across the parking lot to Kentucky Fried Chicken for a Coke when the drink machine was empty – this freedom being a highlight of our trip.
Granny, Papa, and Me, taken at the beauty shop after she and I had our hair did.
Granny’s Life
Granny was for me the epitome of simplicity. She grew up on a farm in the rolling hills of Tennessee – in the Smoky Mountains really. The second oldest of 10 siblings, she counted herself the scared-est and weakest of the bunch, and she said her mama always babied her more than the others as a result.
I knew her to be a fearful women, but it almost doesn’t seem true as I look back on her youth. She went off to Ohio to business school to study stenography, but she has a suspicious number of biology books making me wonder if there is more to her school story than I know.
Somewhere along the way, she met a tall, handsome, uniformed, Alabama man, who to this girl looked faintly like Elvis, and they ran off to Alabama, and she was married in a blue dress in a courthouse.
He became a coal miner, and she raised my mom and my uncle in a little ramshackle house, where of course the kids walked to school in the snow. Eventually, she became the postmaster in her little town, and I would go to work and help sort the mail and push it through the machine. It was a rare treat because I wasn’t really allowed to do anything except maybe hand out stamps.
Granny and Me
She said that when she met me for the first time our eyes locked and her soul met my soul in that deep God meeting way. She said that my eyes said, “Granny pick me up.” She loved me deeply and totally, and no one was poured into my life in quite the same way as she did.
We stayed with Granny and PaPa often when we were little. I can remember her bathing me and singing “Jesus Loves Me” over me, sleeping in her bed and listening to her tell me about the “Three Little Kittens” or “Three Little Pigs” or “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” and in the morning she made biscuits and cooked sausage gravy just for me and my sister, Jenn. We spent the night with her every Friday night for most of my young life, until I was too big to spend the night and marching band took me far and wide to football games.
Later, when I’d graduated and gone to college, every time I’d come to visit she’d ask us to spend the night. I’d say no. If I only knew then what I know now, I’d climb into that bed with her again just one more time.
She learned how to drive when I was in middle school, and I can remember her driving over and checking me out one faithful day after womanhood had come over me unexpectedly. She hugged me and spoke over me as I cried. She listened to me missing my mama and whatever problems I had back in those teenage-y, angst filled days.
When I went to Auburn, she still called everyday, which I did not appreciate. When I spent the summer in Youngstown, NY, she wrote me a note every day I was gone. It was a blessing, pouring life into me when I was serving alone in a new place.
When my life was topsy-turvy, Granny needed a helping hand herself, so I didn’t confess my secrets to her anymore.
My Memories
She cooked pound cakes and tea cookies and fudge pies and lemon pies and cornbread, and for every holiday, there was fresh corn, fried okra, peas, and tomatoes, all from PaPa’s garden. She chewed Juicy Fruit or Big Red, and Mello Yellow was always in the frig. She wore Estee Lauder perfume for special occasions, and every night she put on her Pond’s night cream. She dressed sensibly, but what I remember about her appearance most was her hands – kind, loving, slender, long fingers. She never really told me about the gut wrenching kick you in the tummy hard times she went through, but I know from my mama that she had those stories. She was everything a woman is meant to be, and all I ever heard from her lips was a grateful heart loving Jesus every day.
Two months before she died my kids went to sing “Jesus Loves Me” back to her.
that look of “God sees you”
She died four years after daddy. It will be five years ago today that her frail body passed from here into the arms of Jesus and she took her first dance. She never met my Libby this side of heaven; somehow it seems like she probably kissed her from heaven to here – a blessing to me.
Yesterday, I picked up her pan passed to me and cooked a pound cake using her recipe, to give away just as she and mama would do. It is as if she drew near and danced the sacred dance of womanhood and poured into me again. I would be so blessed if I lived a life so small, but yet so full as hers was for Jesus.
Recently, my mom gave me this poem written by Granny. I dare say she accomplished her dream of becoming the woman her mother was to her. From generation to the next and so it goes.
“My Mother’s Hands”
by Reba Gladden
Mother’s hands were busy hands, but never failed
to take time to tie a bow or braid a loose pigtail.
Never did those hands refuse to smooth a fevered brow,
so injured dolls pulled through in mother’s hands somehow.
It seemed those hands were pure magic, always knowing when to start
to reconstruct shattered dreams or mend a broken heart.
Dear Lord I pray as years go by, whatever life demands
that I may give just half the love that I found in Mother’s hands.
The sands of time may wash away footprints of the past,
but the wonderful memories you left with me, will forever last.
If you liked Granny’s poem, you may like this post I wrote called, “A Woman’s Hands.”
This post is one in a series of posts on 31 days of Simplicity. To read other posts in the series, please click the icon below:
Simplicity Photo Credit: Sharon Mollerus; all others: Jamie S. Harper
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