A JELLY OMELET

They always said my Grandma was the first woman to have a drivers license in Johnson County. I don't know if its true or not, they always said a lot of things but I'll tell you what is true.

Grandma made the best scrambled eggs I ever had.
She had this little Cast Iron Skillet, it was just my size when I was 4,and she would put it on the stove next to the strangest coffee pot I ever saw. It was glass,with a top and bottom, and the water started out in the bottom and it moved up to the top as you watched, and passed through the grounds and finally ended up as coffee in the top. It was a magical thing to behold, and even though I understand the physics of it today, there is still some mystery left within the memory. I've never seen another coffee pot like it, ever.

But back to grandma and those eggs. Her trick, that is to say what she did that made them so good in my eyes, was she would cook them till they were a little brown. My momma cooked them for me like that too, but she didn't have that little black iron skillet, and they just weren't the same. Especially after Grandma reached into the icebox, past the row of six-and-a-half ounce bottles of Dr. Pepper, and pulled out a little Grape Jelly to put on my eggs. Mama never did that.

Grandma would let me help her in the garden. She showed me how to clip off old blossoms on her Roses, and how to snap the little buds off the Mums, explaining how this would make the remaining buds bloom into bigger flowers. She was a member of the Grandview Garden Club, and had a flowered bonnet and friends that came by while we were outside to talk to her, and take a good long look at me. Then we might go hang some laundry on the clothesline, or she might take me to the Crawdad pond, right there south of the house before you got to the High School.

I remember one day after hanging the laundry she went back inside the house to get a string and bacon and a safety pin so we could do just that. I got a little bored waiting for her to come back out, and started to shaking the T-Shaped Laundry pole. It made a funny buzzing sound, and the laundry bounced up and down on the pins clipped to the wire, and the whirring buzzing sound got louder and I shook shook shook the heck out of that pole and then my grandmother was there at the back door to the house and waving her arms and hollering something but I couldn't hear what she was hollering because the buzzing sound was so loud and then I saw a hornet. And another hornet and another, and I started running as fast as I could because now there was that loud buzzing and a cloud of hornets all over my head and they were stinging me as I flew towards the house where Grandma was hollerin' for me to "stop shakin' that pole".
Because there were hornets in there.

What really kills me though, what I think of most when I think back on this, is how no kid in these days of excess would be happy with one little six-and-a-half ounce bottle of Dr. Pepper.