Driving to Grandma’s house in the late 1950s and early 1960s usually meant a day-long pilgrimage. It was an hour’s drive from our home in Decatur, Georgia, as we wound our way through small towns like Stone Mountain, Snellville, Loganville, and Bold Springs until finally arriving at the family’s ancestral home of Winder. 

Mom and Dad both grew up in this northeast Georgia community just a cow chips throw from Athens.

In Winder, I had not one but two grandmothers and one great-grandmother.

My paternal grandmother was nicknamed Dado. Dado had six adult children who kept a watchful eye on their matriarch.  

But my mom was an only child, and it fell to her to be the caretaker for her mother and grandmother.  My maternal grandmother was Lula.  My maternal great-grandmother had the rather unusual moniker of Maw.  That’s because Maw raised my mother and proved to be more of a mother than Lula ever was.  But that’s a story for another day.

These visits to the homes of my grandmothers are a wellspring of heartwarming memories.  For Dado, a scuppernong arbor, an old weather-beaten chicken coop, unheated bedrooms with warm handmade quilts, and the smell of freshly baked yeast rolls prompt deeply satisfying reflections. 

Visits to Maw and Lula, who lived together out of economic necessity, were only slightly different. I remember they had a front porch swing a bored ten-year-old could sit on and rock away a lazy summer afternoon. I recall overnights lying in bed listening to the thunderous rumble and the rhythmic clickety-clack sounds of the midnight train as it lumbered through town.  

Most of all, I remember the food.  Maw could cook.  She made “tea cakes,” her version of a sugar cookie.  She baked a strawberry cobbler that, even now, 65 years later, makes my mouth water. Lordy, why didn’t I get those recipes! She baked her cornbread in an iron skillet, sliced it like a pie, and served it with butter.  Lots and lots of butter.  Black-eyed peas and cornbread seemed to be a staple at every meal, and I always crumbled my cornbread and spooned the black-eyed peas over it before eating.  Didn’t everybody?

You would always find bacon grease as a treasured ingredient in Maw’s cooking. Bacon drippings were liquid gold for a southern cook. Combine a cast iron skillet and bacon grease with green beans, cornbread, or fried okra, and you are sure to please the taste buds of any Southerner. Besides, how else could one fry okra?

I never developed a taste for collard or turnip greens, but Maw always had a “mess of greens” available at any meal. With the table set and the food served, we were encouraged to go ahead and “fix yourself a plate.”  It wasn’t long before someone would sit back and complain that they were “full as a tick on a bloodhound.”  

Every meal began with an admonishment to “get cleaned up and wash your hands.”  And every meal at Maw’s house ended with my momma fixing her a glass of buttermilk and cornbread.  Not me; I dived into the strawberry cobbler.  But momma treated this unusual concoction as her dessert.  She’d crumble leftover cornbread into a glass of cold buttermilk and start spooning this homemade delicacy into her mouth.  I never developed a taste for it, but I suspect this is one of those things that came from growing up during the Depression and not wasting any leftover food.  Regardless, momma loved her buttermilk and cornbread.

Me?  I still have a hankering for strawberry cobbler, fried okra, and black-eyed peas over cornbread. Just like Maw used to make.