This just hit me. I’m so Southern my family has a matriarch and no one in the family knows for sure how old she is. We all also got into a heated debate about the existence of her glass eye (still not confirmed). She’s in her 90s- we think- beat cancer, outlived two husbands, had seven children and has outlived three of them, survived The Great Depression, and either her dad or her grandfather was a full blooded Cherokee Indian… possibly the tribe’s leader but no one really knows for sure.
She also once lit into my dad’s school bus driver, cussing him black and blue about how he treated the kids and didn’t realize she had a butcher’s knife in her hand until he RAN away. She didn’t have any more trouble out of him.
…I wish to know how and why this just occured to you, please
I had an eloquent reason but really what it boils down to is I think Mamaw is a cryptid. The running joke in the family is that Mamaw will be at the end of the world with the twinkies and the cockroaches.
I’m not sure it’s a joke anymore, I think it’s a premonition.
Two years ago one of my cousins wanted to bring her wife to thanksgiving and Joe was all “ew no way” and Mamaw stood her ass up and said “Who the hell do you think you are, saying who is and isn’t welcome in my house? This ain’t your house- you get out! I say who is welcome and YOU is not welcome. Now SCAT!” while slapping at him and then sat back down and asked my cousin if her wife ate catfish. Joe tried to come back in and she popped the tennis balls off her walker and threw them at him until he left
No matter how old Mamaw gets, her hair is still solid black. She still hasn’t gone gray and she’s never once died her hair. Her kids all have heads full of gray hair, and my father- her grandson- is starting to go gray. Mamaw? Nothing. I swear she looks exactly the same as she did when I was a kid.
Mamaw got Covid-19. She presented with symptoms and was rushed to the ER with a dangerously high fever and next to no oxygen. The doctors took note of her age (she’s apparently 93 as best she can guess) and her vitals and, well, Mamaw wasn’t gonna make it past Monday.
By Sunday night the fever was gone and she was complaining that the hospital didn’t get WWE and she was gonna “miss my wrasslin shows!”.
She was home and completely fine by Tuesday. By Wednesday she was calling up the anti-maskers in our family just to call them idiots and hang up.
