Sugar Rocks, Bottle Caps and So Much More

I write a lot about my Grandmother Holden so it's pretty obvious how much I adored her. She was everything a grandmother should be and more. My Mawmaw Cox, on the other hand was not. As a child I just accepted that she wasn't too crazy about us grandkids. I never questioned it or worried about her lack of enthusiasm when we visited. I just assumed she was lazy and didn't like us. I tolerated her because she was married to my pawpaw.

My brother, Timmy and I often spent the night at mawmaw and pawpaw's little house on the edge of Lexington. Pawpaw was the one who cared for us during those visits. He prepared our meals, made sure we bathed but most importantly, he entertained us. He played endless hours of checkers with us on a worn out checker board with bottle caps for checkers, instead of the usual red and black checkers we had bottle caps facing up and down. We spent a fair amount of time on the front porch swinging in the porch swing while pawpaw watched from an old ladder back chair. We dug sugar rocks from the rocky driveway that led to mawmaw and pawpaw's house and raced back to share our treasures with pawpaw. He would inspect them and declare each rock more valuable than the one before. After a long day of playing it was pawpaw who put us to bed in the same room he slept in. Mawmaw had her own room and her own bed that she was in every day before darkness fell. I always thought she sure needed a lot of sleep for someone who did absolutely nothing.

Pawpaw had an endless supply of Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls in the freezer, a cookie jar filled with no bake chocolate oatmeal cookies, and plenty of cokes in returnable bottles that he was eager to share with us. In the mornings he would fry eggs over medium and serve them to us with some of mawmaw's frozen biscuits. I loved the eggs but the biscuits.....not so much. Occasionally mawmaw would get up out of her chair and join us for our meals but sadly, those occassions were few and far between. She rarely got out of her chair for anyone other than herself. She would just sit and stare all day long.

Looking back I can see mawmaw suffered from depression. Maybe with today's treatment she would have had a more fulfilling life. The only kind of treatment she had that I am aware of was the ceramic class she took as some sort of therapy. I'm not a doctor but I think the only purpose it served was to fill mawmaw's walls with hideous ceramic fruit and other ridiculous looking plaques. I don't know for sure why she was the way she was but I do know that while she sat alone in her chair pawpaw was busy doing double duty. He was everything a pawpaw should be and more.