Blog Every Day in May Day 12 - What do you miss? (a person, a thing, a place, a time of your life...)

    My Great Grandmother Louise was everything!  She was independent, feisty and sharp as a whip!   My first memory of her is when I was little and she lived in this little Michigan town.  My sister and mom and I had gone to visit for the summer.  I remember getting up at the crack of dawn to go fishing with her and my mom. We'd pick lunch from her garden (she ALWAYS had a garden), stop at the corner store for $1 worth of lunch meat and head out!  We would be out there for hours! I loved it because I got to play with worms, make mud pies and play in the fishing hole while my mom and GG Louise fished and talked.    I can't find the picture now, but GG Louise had these mutt dogs named Runt and Stunt and I LOVED them so.  Later when GG Louise moved to our small MS town, she stayed in them streets!  She never drove mind you but you could find her walking all over town nearly everyday.  She'd usually have a fishing pole, a stray dog trailing behind her, a camel unfiltered hanging out of the corner of her mouth and a bucket/bag of some sort.  She also kept a bottle of brown likka in her fridge.  I once asked her what was that brown stuff for and she told me it was to "thin her blood!" LOL   GG Louise was a looker too y'all!  She had the smoothest, deep chocolate skin I have ever seen! Imagine that beautiful skin against the clear, gray eyes! GG Louise was fine honey! OMG her hair? Soft as cotton and I mean that literally! She always kept it in plaits cause when she needed to get fancy real quick she could slap on a wig!   I miss GG Louise because I didn't get the chance to hear her talk about her life like I would have liked.  Word in these ancestry streets is that she killed one of her husbands.  Now I would have loved to hear her tell that story.  I would have loved to hear stories about her childhood or parents, or education, her life.   While I miss GG Louise immensely, I still have the lessons she left behind. She taught me how to plant and till a garden and how to scale and gut a fish after you catch it, among other things.  The most important lesson I learned from her is how very important it is for women to be self-sufficient.