What I Want You to Know

I come from humble beginnings, and I credit those life lessons to every view I have in life. But the things that are so ingrained in me are the things I take for granted and the things that don’t make sense to outsiders. Those are the things I want you to know.

Loving others is a way of life in my family. If there is a need, you fill it. If there is a want, you get it. Motives don’t get in the way because the simple acts are as easy as those two principles. If they want it, if they need it, find a way.

I’ve often written about my grandmother. She’s decaying with Alzheimer’s these days, but I cling to the memories of the woman she was. I’ve always been mesmerized by her story, maybe because I relate to her so much. The older I get, the more I think we would be alike.

But above all else, I learned what it meant to be passionate from her without the flowery hearts and bubbles that we associate with all our feelings.

When I was six, she taught me to sew a “knot dress” and I’ll never forget the story behind it. Years before I was born but after my father and uncle left the house, she took in these three kids. They weren’t orphaned, their parents had just fallen on hard times. So she took them for a while. I remember her telling me that they were dirty, so she got them all cleaned up. When she got done with that, she realized they didn’t have any clean clothes, so she made up a pattern for the little girls to make fast dresses. She was an amazing seamstress and sewed the majority of my clothes growing up.

It’s a simple story of a simple woman filling a simple need. She can sew. She had scrap fabric. They needed clothes. See a need: Fill it.

Years went by and I would spend my Saturdays sewing with my grandmother. We would make elopement suits for my Barbies and American Girl Doll clothes, sure, but then there were times when we would sew kittens for the police officers to hand out to the children who had been in accidents. Not teddy bears. We decided bears would be frightening. Kittens, though, they were much more comforting.

And then there was Belize. Every year my church asked for thousands of things to take to Belize. She would only buy Dial soap. She knew how to buy Dial soap, she used it on her family and would stock up for the Belize trip.

And as far as I know, the people of Belize still smell like Dial soap.

When I tell people what it means to be from the South, I think a lot of the culture boils down to these simple ideals of finding void and filling it. I didn’t realize that everyone didn’t think like I did until recently. But in this case, I’m happy being the oddball.