Grandmother's Way

In 1957 we moved to Cobb Street. That was the house where you could put a ball in the kitchen and it would roll out of the front door. Grandmother use to hide goodies in a draw in her bedroom. Her and granddaddy's room was in the center of the house. To get to the kitchen you had to go through Grandmother's room. You could access half of the house through her bedroom. I think she had three doors in her room. Anyway, she and grandaddy had NO privacy whats-so- ever.
Their room had originally been the dining room. When you entered the house you walked right into the living room. The boy's room was off to the left. From the living room you walked through a french door into Grandmother's room. You passed from her room into a small narrow room (we used it for the dining room) and into the kitchen. The small narrow room was probably used as a place to store dishes etc. when the house was originally built. In it's day this was probably a very elegant home. The reason the house was slanted was because it had been moved to Cobb Street from somewhere else. Whoever moved it didn't seem to give a flip how they planted the house. Besides being slanted it was also in the parking lot of a grocery store. Our front yard was the parking lot of a Piggly Wiggly or something! Can you imagine how my teenage brothers felt when their friends came over? The side yard was an empty lot full of weeds and grass. We never owned a lawn mower so the grass only got taller. We had no backyard. The people behind us had chickens. You could stand on the back stoop and spit into the chicken yard. On the other side of the house was an ally... Ah,... but we did have those red clay cliffs that brought so much fun for me and Bobby. I smoked my first cigarette there. I was 11 years old.
As I said earlier, Grandmother hid cookies and stuff in her bedroom drawer.I never knew about this cache so I didn't know what I had been missing. But Larry and Jerry knew about it. I have no idea how they knew but, Jerry caught hell one day when Grandmother discovered her bag of cookies empty.Oh,..there may have been a few cookies left ,and some crumbs.
I was sitting in the living room when I heard this god awful sound. Grandmother!! The empty bag of cookies!! Lord help who ate them!
Larry blamed Jerry. Jerry blamed Larry. Grandmother went into a tail spin. She threw the bag on the floor, started jumping up and down on it totally destroying whatever was left in the bag. She yelled; she screamed, and went absolutely to pieces. She flung herself on her bed and starting crying. It was then that she said her favorite and famous line, "Lay the crucifix on me.I've swallowed my tongue. Oh, Lord, help me, I've swallowed my tongue. Lay the crucifix on me and call the priest."
Really..... what do you do in a situation like that? We didn't know..... so we did what we usually did. We laughed. Of course, that only made things worse. Poor grandaddy..he kept saying ,"Now, Hollis, calm down, For god sakes, calm down!"
This was not the first time we had heard Grandmother say she was swallowing her tongue. I didn't have a clue what she meant, but I knew it was serious.
To this day I am not really sure who ate the cookies. I have asked both brothers over the years, and they both say the other one ate them. One said he only had a few and the other brother ate the rest. I don't know; I don't care, but Grandmother was fit to be tied that day, and I have a fond and funny memory of the way she was.