More than words can say.

One grandmother -

Sitting on the bench beside the Carousel, smiling and waving everytime your pony comes round.

Tucking you in at night in the bedroom your father slept in as a child and telling you about how they used it as a chicken coop during the '36 flood.

Wonderful country cooking, especially "Nannie beans" at big Sunday and holiday dinners - nobody could cook the half-runners from Papaw's garden to taste as good (or be so bad for you) as Nannie.

Tearing up leftover biscuits with great ceremony and entrusting you to carry them out to toss for the birds. Motioning for you to come quietly to the back door to watch the birds feed and bathe in the mornings after breakfast.

Keeping graham crackers and other treats in the big drawer in the stove beside the oven where they stayed warm and crisp, and in reach of little hands.

Letting you watch as she carefully but on her hat and a little lipstick every evening before putting us in the car to go downtown to pick up Papaw from his office at the C&O.

Fiercely snapping off the offending flowers of geraniums, petunias and snapdragons at the first sign of fading - and transferring a life-long love of flower gardening to her granddaughter - I can not go into the garden without the image of her in my mind.

Carefully navigating a steep hillside at the city park in her very prim and proper dresses and pumps to find the little creek with a bit of wildness and woods that reminded her of her mountain farm childhood, three stair-step granddaughters trailing behind her like ducklings. Then sitting right down on the mossy bank in spite of her clothes and taking off her shoes and stockings to dangle her feet in the cool water.

Sewing buttons, mending torn linings, repairing seams, anytime a ragged, lazy and broke college student grandchild showed up in a cab from the college in time for a free meal.

Stringing beans on thread for leatherbritches, and apples as well, to make winter time dried apple stack cake.