Granny C.

Lately I've been trying to tackle an ever-growing mound of old photographs that need to be scanned, cleaned up, and stored digitally. This project will take me the rest of my life, I think. But it's conjured up all kinds of good memories.

My memories today center around my Grandma Cissell. As she got older, we began calling her Granny. She's shown here with my mom and my Aunt Rita.

Granny was a feisty ol' girl and for the most part, a lot of fun. I loved staying at her house when I was a kid. She was a great cook. Over her 92 years, she's provided her family with a lot of love and a lot of funny stories. Some weren't so funny at the time, but the passage of time caused them to be funny.

When my grandpa was still alive, I was staying with them a week during the summer. Grandpa died in 1972, I think...so I was probably 17 when this happened. My cousin Scott and I were sitting on the front screened-in porch with grandpa. Granny had just been to the beauty salon and was sporting a curly, but stinky, new perm. She stuck her head through the door between the living room and the porch and spoke to us briefly. Then she disappeared for a few minutes. I heard the back door, so figured she went out to do one of her daily chores.

A couple of minutes later, we heard a huge explosion. My first thought was the nearby Navy base blowing up old ordnance, which they did on a regular basis. But a few seconds later, I heard Granny screaming my name at the top of her lungs. We both reached the kitchen at about the same time. Granny looked as if she'd seen a ghost. I knew immediately what she'd done.

Her face had a red flash-burn. But the worst was her hair. That new perm was melted probably 1/4 inch on the ends. The hairs were curled up and even melted to each other. Her eyebrows were gone. And boy, did she smell!

Granny had gone out to burn her trash, but apparently wasn't happy with the speed it was burning. So she threw gasoline into the trash barrel. I guess she didn't quite understand how dangerous that was. Luckily, she didn't spill any of the gasoline on herself. I spent the next hour or so trimming the burned hair from her new perm. She didn't even blister from the flash burn, but her skin was red for a few days. As far as I know, she never tried that stunt again.

Speaking of fire, during one of my Uncle Bob's visits from Alabama, he and Aunt Nancy had bought Grandma and Grandpa a home fire extinguisher. He explained how and when to use it to both of them.

About six months later, Uncle Bob and Aunt Nancy were visiting again. At Granny's house, visiting always took place at the kitchen table for family and close friends. As Uncle Bob was sitting there, he looked around and didn't see the fire extinguisher. So he asked Grandma where it was.

In typical Granny-fashion, she told him, "Oh we never used it, so I gave it to Virginia". Uncle Bob nearly split a gut laughing at her.

Granny thought of herself as a very accurate weather forecaster. She would call me AFTER it started raining, and would always say, "I told you it was going to rain". That way, she was always 100 percent accurate. She loved to watch the weather and any good tragedy on the news. I don't care if the weatherman was predicting a blizzard in the Rockies, to my granny, that was the weather in Indiana. There was no such thing as national news and national weather--it was always local to her. She would've loved cable TV, where news and weather plays 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Her favorite thing to do was to walk through the living room as you were watching a TV show. She'd reach over, flip the channel, and walk out of the room. It didn't matter if you were watching something. It was her TV and the only thing that should be allowed to air on her TV were "her shows". And it was just easier to wait a couple of minutes after she left the room to flip the station back to the show we were watching.

We loved Granny dearly, even though she could be aggravating at times. She never held back an opinion, and always spoke her mind. It didn't matter if it upset anyone--if she had something to say, she was going to say it.

More granny stories later. I have a ton of them. Miss you, Granny C.