Mary Chapin Carpenter and my Great Grandmother

I listened to "Family Hands" this morning. It always reminds me of my Great Grandmother. Although, not in the same sense that the song reflects. Born Mary Emma Glenn, (it's how I'm distantly related to John Glenn) She was my mother's father's mother. She was not what you might picture. She lived her life in Central Texas, about 100 miles west of Fort Worth. Rough, arid, cattle country, hers was not an easy life, and it showed on her face, thin and hard. Nor was she indulgent to us youngsters. She loved us, no doubt, her lemon meringue pie alone proved that, but she didn't have patience for foolishness. One telling thing about her was that she cautioned us not to disturb or hurt the black King snakes that we might find around the house. They were sacred. They kept the rattlesnakes away.

We loved going there for Thanksgiving and Christmas. The food was amazing and there was "The Mountain" to explore. The mountain probably didn't qualify technically, but it was the tallest thing I'd ever seen until I was a teenager. Covered in several varieties of cactus and mesquite trees, it was not easily negotiated. Did I mention rattlesnakes? OK, so I never actually saw one, but they were there. We usually visited in the cooler months, so they weren't very active. There was a small hill about a third the way up, we called the "Knob". From it you could see the house, the town of Gordon to the east, and the terrain to the north. You had to be older to get permission to climb to the top of the big mountain. I remember my first time to do it. Two cousins and I scrambled through all the brush to get there. (We never came down without a session of plucking out the fine hairlike needles of prickly pear cactus, found at the base of the large needles and on the "fruit" itself.) When we got to the top, one of our much older relatives was already there. "How did you get up here so fast? we asked. "I followed the cow path." DOH!

I was nine when my great-grandmother died. I didn't really know her. I wish that I'd had the wisdom to talk to her more and that she'd had the patience to tell us her stories.