Bad Weather and Granny

I originally penned this back in the days of MySpace. It was written as a MySpace note, if ya'll remember those.... My Mom had saved it (to my good luck) and I, thanks to her, am gonna share it once more in honor of  "Severe Weather Awareness" week. I have some good/bad memories regarding severe weather. Lots of people in my family are really anxious about these NWS warnings that we so frequently get down south. So in honor of them and my dearly departed grandmother, I give you this. It's dedicated entirely to Mary George Chaney Boyd; may she look on me and smile.



It's supposed to be bad weather tonight... most people don't even mind. They go on with their lives as if nothing is any different. I, however, always think back to my childhood.........

My grandmother (Granny) lived in my mother's house from about a year after I was born until the day she died. She convinced my poor unsuspecting daddy to build her an apartment (adjacent, but not with open entrance to his living quarters) attached to his house. Poor daddy didn't know what was coming. On the plus side, in Daddy's court, she kept me and my brother a lot when we were little. Anytime the wind blew wrong, she threw my brother and me in the hallway.  If it was especially windy, she would throw the couch cushions on top of us.

The worst nights were when we had a bad storm and the power would go out. Remember Daddy has tolerated Granny's presence in his home since he was in his thirties. He has also learned to keep his mouth shut and deal with it. On stormy nights she would always sit at the end of the kitchen table usually smoking a Kool (she quit when I was seven). She had several rules for the four grandchildren and their parents.....

1) Stay away from the front door... you'll get hit by a flying limb.

2) Stay away from the sink and don't go to the bathroom (apparently aunt somebody got struck by lightning washing dishes)

3) Don't sit under the ceiling fan (if the house blows away the last thing you want to hit you is the ceiling fan)

4) Turn the TV off and unplug it (even though it is our best way to get the weather). We don't want to buy a new TV if lightning strikes.

5) Don't go outside... even three hours after it passed. Some man was standing on his deck three hours after a storm, one time, and lightning struck him and he hasn't been the same since.

6) Forget the rest of you... "I'm (Granny) getting in the hallway... get off the couch so i can have the cushions."

We always heard the same rules. But i digress, when the power went off (inevitable in rural Mississippi) we would sit around for hours and figure out how to entertain each other. My sisters were way too good to play with my brother and I; they usually sat on the couch and ignored us. My dad would look for batteries for what seemed like hours, and, if he was lucky, he would locate enough for a radio and at least we could listen to country music. My mama lit candles and my great grandmother's oil lamp. This "Lamp" was a fixture in our house. It was your typical hurricane lamp. But... according to Mama it was "a hundred years old" and "it will set the whole house on fire if you touch it." Many a time I was informed that "That Lamp will blow you to New Jersey". 

Granny's job during all of this chaos, was to try not to get on Daddy's nerves and to entertain me and Gabe (my little brother). In that spirit we played games. Not board games, no, we were way to creative for those. We played "My Ship Goes Sailing", "I Spy", and, my all time favorite, "The Quiet Game". We always fought, I always lost the quiet game. Nikki and Lisa ended up playing with us despite their "I'm too cool to play with little kids because I am a teenager" attitudes. Gabe would spy nothing so that he could be "it" all night long. Mama would guess occasionally and Daddy would grumble for us to be quiet (from his perch on the recliner) every now and then, although we never complied. 

Hours would pass until, inevitably, we heard that familiar "hum" and every light in the house would come on. At that point, we would all say "The power's on! YaY!" (in unison) and we would go back to our corners. Granny would go back to her house (an apartment on the end of ours) unless there was another line of storms on the way. In that case she would sleep on the couch, just in case her end of the house were to blow away and ours didn't. It never did. 

It's weird though... I never had a scary experience with thunderstorms/tornadoes. Yet, no matter how many storms move through I find myself warning my kids, just like my Granny warned us. "Get away from the windows. Get out from under that ceiling fan. Don't you dare take a shower, or wash dishes." I repeat those warnings because, once upon a time, I had an aunt, and she got struck by lightening while washing dishes." I still don't know if she recovered.