My grandmother always being there for me in time of need and more specifically her "junk drawer". She used to put things in her junk drawer that she knew would delight me. It was like going through a treasure chest every time I went to visit!

I love my grandmother so much. She died last year at age 98. God rest her soul.

That is such a cute idea Sis!!! I want to copy that idea for when I have grandkids! :)

My favorite memories are hunting with my dad......just tagging along behind him:)

That's a good one Dix!
Did you learn to shoot or did you scare the animals away?

When I was in high school, and still too young in my mom's mind to drink coffee, I would get up an extra half hour early just to sit at the kitchen table and talk to her as she had her morning coffee. We talked about anything and everything - just she and I. As I got a little older, she eventually let me have a half cup of coffee, half cup of milk thing. Cafe au lait. Who know?

Anyway, I will always treasure that time with my mom.

Don't ask Cherry or Eeyow if I can shoot Sis....please!

Cindy, that is a very special time....it was the exact same for me except it was my dad instead of my mom. And when I was really little he would make his coffee in a perk style coffee pot....so of course the stuff was boiling hot!! Then he would pour it into a cup and saucer, bring it to the table and then pour a little coffee into the saucer, this helped cool it faster for him to sip it out of the saucer. (round saucer) Anyway, he and I would wait for the ghost to appear every morning after he poured his coffee. You see our house ghost liked coffee too:) It wasn't long and the saucer would slide across the table!!! This was so exciting to me lol. Took me a while to figure out it was the condensation of water on the bottom of the saucer and the swishing of the coffee that made it move across the table :)

All of my memories with my grandmother are good ones. She was an old, ornery, mountain woman who still kept to the traditional ways and spoke like Sophia from THE GOLDEN GIRLS.

Some of my most treasured moments, though, come from a family friend's house. She lived in a beautiful 5,000 sq. ft. plantation house on a former plantation in the south. It wasn't grand like it used to be, but it was amazing to explore as a child-lots of secret stairways, tunnels, and treasures in the attic. She kept a magnifnicent vegetable garden and every summer we would go stay with her a few times and pick whatever we wanted. While we were there, she would make us a huge feast of corn on the cob, fried potatoes, fried green tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans...pork chops.

I can remember every morning crawling out of that big feather bed and my feet hitting the hardwood floors. I'd look out the window and see her down in the garden, dirty and brown from the sun. From my window, things hadn't changed in 100 years. I'd pretend I was back in time and a southern belle.

She taught me how to can vegetables, cook, and garden. I would sit in the kitchen with her for hours listening to her talk about the history of the house and, together, we would envision it the way it used to be when balls were held in the parlor.

She was an older woman at the time and very good to me. I had no idea that she was the school system's superintendent. :-) My childhood was scattered and this was one of the most permament things about it-visiting her house.

Years later, she moved and about 15 years after that I took my husband back to the house. It's abandoned now and the clawfoot tub that she used to fill with bubble bath for me is broken in two. The floors of the bedroom I used to sleep in are rotted through. There are spiderwebs on the chandeliers.

*shug* It's still beautiful to me.

i was lucky enough to have 11 years with my maternal great grandmother. bled, your story reminded me of her. she outlived 3 husbands and was such a strong and positive woman. she lived through the depression, gardened, quilted...i remember visiting her in her victorian home with the big feather bed you could hide in it sank in so much! she was always quilting, writing letters, or cooking something - best cobbler in the world. it was a long ride (for a kid, only 2 hours really), but i loved going to visit her. she'd save the old wooden spools for us to make necklaces. or clover necklaces like i posted a photo of. and she read the Bible every morning and i would sit under the table as she did...
thanks for taking us down memory lane, dixe!

I'm loving this thread! I hope more people will come in and write or maybe some of you will add another story?

My childhood was pretty jacked up, but i guess one thing i remember fondly was rollerbladeing all over the neighborhood and rideing my bike. Me and my childhood friend would ride all over town and rollerblad to the ballpark and play on the playground.

back in those days it was safe for kids to bike all over town

I also loved visiting my Grandmother. She and my Grandfather lived on a farm and had approx. 500 acres of land. They had a HUGE house with cathedral ceilings and a beautiful staircase. Lots of antique beds and marble lined dressers upstairs. Being out in the country on a piece of property with so much land was extremely peaceful. I remember waking up each day to the sound of the birds chirping and at night, I would hear the frogs croaking. I would go downstairs every morning and put on some rubber boots and head out out to the barn to help milk the cows and pitch fresh hay, and yes, I pitched alot of manure too! lol Indians used to live on the land so there was alot of flint to be found if you dug a little, so that was always fun. My grandmother was very "crafty" (as I am today) and I remember her teaching me how to "press flowers" and make cards. There is a special card making technique she taught me using kleenex that turns out so beautiful in the end, I ended up demonstrating it during a high school Speech class.

My grandparents passed away long ago and my Aunt and Uncle did their best to maintain the house, but it needed alot of work as it had seen better days. The house was sold a few years ago which was something that made me really sad. I remember tears sreaming down my face when I heard the news that it was no longer in the family. Just this evening I told my husband that if we ever hit the lottery, I would want to try to buy that house (and land) back from the person who bought it and have it completely renovated so that we could live in it and it would be there for our future generations. Yes, it is a dream of mine, but you never know.....sometimes dreams DO come true.

When I was a kid, I used to love going to visit my grandparents on the family farm. My great aunt and uncle live in the big house, my one cousin live in one house and another cousin lived built a farm on the land. My grandparents was the smallest but they had a fence in yard. Beautiful flowers that my grandfather toolk care of and a garden to die for. At first they had the garden behind the old tobacco barn. Then they moved it inside the fence. As they got older, my grandfather couldn't maintain a garden anymore but he kept up on his cherry tomatoes. i remember being a kid and my grandparents, and my grandparents giving me a list of things to get from the garden. And always picking ripe peaches from the peach tree eating one or 2 before we came inside. I would get lost in the garden for hours, eating as much as i would pick. The fresh tomatoes, the green peppers, cucumber. But his tomatoes were always the best. And he always left that job for me if he knew I was going to be there in a couple of days. I loved it.

We had a large garden on our property growing up cause we were poor and my mom canned alot of stuff. I was so young that i didn't care what I did as long as I was "part of". I guess gardens were my thing when I was little. So my job at 4 years old was to rearrange the earth worms and when it came to fixing dinner, my job was to help my mom snap the green beans! Oh how I loved that sound. To this day, if my dad is fixing homemade green bean, he will cut the ends off and I will snap them.

I guess you could say that gardening is in my blood. i just have found that place yet to have my own garden. But have learned and tasted from the best!