The Man Who Lost
Remembering Grandma

Whether forking a pie crust together or hoeing in the corn fields, she moved deliberately, her pace matching nature's. A quiet, pensive expression softly suggested that she was forever in thought; a beautiful woman, mature, old to me, even in my first memories of her.

Worn in a bun, her hair reached down to the back of her knees. On quilt pallets by the pot-bellied stove, with shadows of light sparsely illuminating the blue tongue-and-grove walls and ceiling, I played as she let down and brushed her hair, holding the long strands in front of her and stroking forward and away, the full-length of her reach--pausing intermittently to spit into a tin can. Grandma enjoyed snuff.

Born a few years after the Civil War, Annie witnessed a lot, knew a lot, shared a lot.

She and Grandpa cleared fields by hand from a portion of bequeathed land that originally encompassed four modern-day counties in the Piedmont of North Carolina. My grandparents descended from English and Irish stock who in the 1600’s settled the rolling hills that begin where the ancient alluvial plain gives way to the rising terrain of clay, superb potters’ clay…red clay.

During my childhood, my parents worked and I was farmed out to live with childless Aunt Rosie and Uncle Graham. You could see Grandma’s house from Aunt Rosie’s, both occupying the tallest hills around. It was a wonderful, naive, barefooted adventure to skip, run, and leap down through the forest, cross two branches and climb the rutted path between the fields and pastures to Grandma’s--a distance of about twenty-minutes travel. We spent a lot of time at Grandma’s, Rosie and me, or just me.

When I traveled alone to Grandma’s, Rosie would pensively wait and watch until she could see in the distance, my white hair bouncing around in Grandma’s yard. Then she could relax and tend to her chores. I was the fortunate cousin; I had two farms, all the animals and four adults to myself.

Grandma was literate, but Rosie wasn’t. Not being able to read and write didn’t interfere with Rosie’s capacity to love however; her hugs were the strongest and most sincere. “I’m your second mother,” she always insisted.

Rosie could not learn in the Acorn-ridge, one-room school. “It was because she was touched in the head,” Grandma said.

Before the Model T, Grandpa and Grandma would take teams and wagons filled with farm products they had grown or Grandpa had purchased from his brothers and others who had surrounding farms to Pinehurst and Southern Pines to sell. The road was constructed of wooden planks. The Plank Road connected Fayetteville to Winston-Salem and ran through our isolated community.

Today, Pinehurst is around a twenty-minute drive, but it took a day-and-a-half for my grandparents to make the journey by wagon. Pinehurst resort was developed in the last years of the 19th century and Southern Pines had a railway station, both good marketplaces for the farm goods.

A smile and then a quiet chuckle always preceded a tale from Grandma as she often reminisced with me. In winter, on the Plank Road, it was so cold that they would let the horses go unattended while she and Grandpa would walk and take short cuts through the woods to stay warm, meeting up with the teams of horses on down the way. A favorite story of Grandma’s was when the stones they heated to stay warm while sleeping caught the blankets on fire. She relished retelling that story of Grandpa’s reaction to the smoldering blankets.

Grandpa was the first in the area to purchase a Model T, a door-less cab with a truck-bed. When Rosie was a baby, traveling to Pinehurst in the Model T, they hit a pothole in the planks and Grandma and Rosie were thrown from the cab into the ditch. Grandma said that baby Rosie landed on her head, hence the meaning, ‘touched in the head.’

"Carpetbaggers," mumbled Grandma when she was agitated.

Our family church was established in 1703 and the original trustees included African Americans. After the War Between the States, the congregation segregated. I assume from Grandma’s disdain of carpetbaggers that the answer to why after almost two hundred years of worshiping together the church’s segregation became necessary is in the reconstruction’s mess somewhere…Carpetbaggers?

Annie lived 99 years and I wish I could write justly about her, share all her wonders with you as she shared the wonders of nature with me—where the birds lived, nested and if the bird had lost its partner or not—and the names of trees and plants and the plantings of the moon--but, alas, I’ll leave you with a memory of a special conversation.

On a visit around 1970 towards the end of Grandma’s farming days--she kept going, gardening and so forth long after Grandpa passed away--she and I were shelling peas together on the L-shaped porch. I inquired about her hand-carved dough board, a hardwood, knife hewed vessel large enough for a toddler to use as a canoe. The board that had fed generations from her kneading hands with breads and pies made with homegrown grains stone-ground a few miles away at the water mill.

The smile and chuckle of hers appeared.

Grandma first asked for my trust, to keep secret what she was going to say, and I agreed.

“I was thinking about him.”

“Who Grandma?

“The man who lost,” she answered smiling deeply, remembering.

The dough board--my most precious possession today--was a wedding-day gift to my Grandmother, Annie,

from the suitor who lost.