Grandma Hayes

My grandmother lived in a big house next to a funeral home. There was a wall that separated my grandparents property and the funeral. All kids like to climb and I managed to get up on that wall and was in the process of walking on it when my grandfather came out of the house and scare me by telling me to get off the wall or the dead people would come and get me. I never climbed that wall again. Having had children and grandchildren myself; I now know that he was protecting me from falling off the wall.

I have memories of blue hydrangea growing on either side of the stairs that led to the large screened in porch that went all the way across the front of the house. We called them "snowball flowers" because they were so large and fluffy looking.

When I think of grandma's living room; I can see a couch that was made of a course material, ( I believe it was horsehair). There was a curio cabinet that held her collection of all kins of elephants. No one seems to know why grandma collected elephants. A very strange type of bird was also in the cabinet. It was a "drinking bird". Grandma would place a glass of water in front of it and it would bend over to drink from the glass. As a child, I thought it was real; it fascinated me.

All grandma's give out milk and cookies; and ours did also. I see the pretty blue glass cup that she would pour my milk into. What made the cup a little special was the picture of Shirley Temple on it.

Sunday would have been the day that we visited grandma's; probably after attending church. She would give us paper dolls that she had cut out from magazines or the funny papers. The one from the magazine was "Betsy McCall", from the McCall magazine.

There were many granddaughters that these paper dolls were given to; and I am pretty sure that my cousin Ruthie also received some of them. Ruthie's mother, Aunt Ruth was the oldest of my grandmother's twelve children.

I saw most of my cousins at Christmas or when we would have family get-togethers in the summer time. Most of us lived in the Washington Metropolitan area; however there were two of grandma's children living out of state. Uncle John lived in Georgia and Aunt Doris lived in Florida. We did not see them as often as the other aunts and uncles. There was a special gathering of all of us whenever either one of these aunts or uncles would come to see grandma.