Going to the Grocery Store with Grandma

The hill above where the barn once stood is speckled with new homes. It’s surely hard for the people who live there to imagine a time when a small lone farm house stood on the level ground below their development.

For as long as I could remember, my grandmother, Elsie Seymour Turner Heiskell and her brother Clyde Seymour had lived in that house on what was then a sparsely graveled rutted lane off Hickory Star Road.

Announced by the crunching of gravel, a few cars rolled passed the house each day. My grandmother and uncle always came to the porch to see who it was. Sometimes, the drivers slowed to offer a friendly wave and hello and moved on. Most often they stopped to chat. They shared a bit of community news, or as on one memorable day, lifted the trunk to return an exhausted fox hound that had collapsed on their property.

The owner of the hound was my lanky Uncle Clyde. Each afternoon, when he had finished everything that needed to be done on the farm, he loped off down the lane to “run errands.” He usually had a list compiled by my grandmother tucked into the breast pocket of his bib overalls.

One day my uncle had no sooner left the house than my grandmother realized she had left something off the list—something necessary. Something so important that she told me to “run after him and see if you can catch him.”

I didn’t have to go far to see down the lane to the road to know that he was gone. We always thought he left to hang out at my Uncle Jim Heiskell’s store and gas station, but a phone call revealed that he had not been seen there. A few more calls yielded no results.

“Put your shoes on,” my grandmother said. “We are going to the store.”

I was mystified. “How?” I questioned. “We have no car.”

My grandmother removed her apron, ran dampened fingers through her hair, smoothed her dress, took up her handbag, and directed me to join her on the front porch where we positioned ourselves on two of the ladder back chairs. As she had anticipated, we didn't have to wait long before a car crunched up the lane to the house.

From the porch, she called to the driver, “Would you mind taking us into Maynardville to the grocery store?”

We climbed into the car and after being dropped at the store, almost immediately learned that Uncle Clyde had already been there.

While I was worrying and wondering how in the world we were going to get back to the house, my grandmother made her purchase and scanned the shoppers for the person who would be least inconvenienced by giving us a ride.

It seemed to me it was only minutes before we were being dropped at the house with our grocery shopping complete.

That evening I shared the adventure with my mother and declared that I surely had the smartest spunkiest grandmother in the world. I marveled that people could be so kind. My family lived in a community where “we hated to ask” for help: where we minded our own beeswax.

My mother chuckled at my amazement. You see, she knew these people and their ways. She wasn’t at all surprised.

By the way, we learned later that Uncle Clyde had been offered a ride almost as soon as he had set out that afternoon, and that wasn’t surprising either.