HARDWICKS ARMY

They don't make Grannies anymore

Note: We lost Granny this week, RIP Helen Conway Williams

Our Granny

Have you noticed that all the grannies are disappearing from the face of the earth?

Our generation may be the last to experience the true blue-haired, baking, cleaning little grandma that is stereotypical of the name “granny.”
Personally, I haven't a clue about stereotypical grandma's because neither one of mine were typical nor grannified. However, thanks to my husband’s mother whom we call Granny I have been exposed.

She is the real deal. I have been studying her for 14 years as if I were studying a captured Bigfoot. Granny sightings are now becoming more rare than a Sasquatch.

What is a true granny and how do you know if you have one?

I will share my years of research to define the art of being a granny. You too may have a rare granny in your mist and if you do, treat her well, give her lots of hugs because they don’t make real grannies anymore.

The new grandmother knows how to use a computer, smartphone and DVR remote. She eats healthier, works out regularly and can NOT make “real” banana pudding. There is nothing wrong with the new grandma, but just something special about the old version.

You see, the older version never had the instant way of life that the new ones have, no disposable wipes, disposable diapers, disposable meals or disposable husbands. They had to work hard and reuse everything in what we now label recycling. Grannies have been conserving energy as a way of life way before it became politically correct. All Grannies are green through and through.

Grannies can’t understand the popularity of Subway: “If I wanted to eat a sandwich, I would have made one at home.”

The granny mentality is foreign to us modern techy youngin’s. I have some tips on identifying a Granny:

She might be a Granny IF:

• She has ‘Never’ been on a plane and ain’t going to get on one!
• She doesn't know who or what a Kardashian is unless she has been on “Dancing With the Stars”
• She has the best exfoliating towels. Why? Because she still hangs her laundry on a clothes line even though she owns a dryer. She just won’t use it because it uses too much electricity. Forget soft towels when you get out of the bath, the rough ones exfoliate better than an expensive Dead Sea Scroll solution.
• If you need a band aid in her presence, she has one in her purse, her pocket or in her vintage tin Band aid can that they quit making decades ago and if you were to put it on Ebay you could sell for $30 dollars.

Grandpa

• She will iron your clothes… and the curtains, the sheets and anything else that has a wrinkle. Watch out GRANDPA!
• She will still try to grow a garden every year and can jellies, shell a pea so fast no one will ever see her fingers move. You can find antique peas in the freezer too!
• She gets her hair teased every Saturday morning and never, ever get it wet throughout the week.

• She can make banana pudding from scratch and the top is meringue and nothing has instant on the side of the box.
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• She can not put gas in a car.
• She thinks it economically correct to feed six chickens rather than buy a dozen eggs.
• She wears clip on earrings, false teeth, granny jeans and a hair net.
• She is so worried about all the bad news, that she sends a reused peanut butter jar of water home with her adult son just in case he wrecks in a ditch on the way home and they don’t find him for several days.
• She is told to bring one dish but she needs help carrying food from the back of her granny-mobile which is full of deserts, peas, another desert, bread, and other country cooked entrees.
• She has a car that she rarely drives, and although it is ten years old you can still smell the new car smell, unlike mine where after a year it smells like a skunk died in the trunk.
• She has a pot, a bowl or a utensil for every occasion and knows how to work it.
• She puts a cover on everything from a chair, a sofa, a table, a kitchen appliance and even on covers for her covers! Watch out Grandpa!
• She has saved every outfit her children wore and produced them for their children to wear.
• She has mastered the art of “Hovering.”

If you answered yes to any of these statements… you might have a granny.

As I grew up, the only visual of a granny I could think of was the one from the “Beverly Hillbillies” show in which little gray haired Granny was always cooking roadkill stew for Jethro and Ellie Mae or making moonshine for medicinal purposes.

Beverly Hillbilly Granny

I found that grannies can clean anything and will clean everything… not wiped over like us modern women… but spit shine clean using a secret ingredient rarely seen anymore… elbow grease. In the hands of Granny I have never seen my kids shine so clean. I have tried to reproduce the same result, but fail miserably.

Grannies can fish and fry it up in a pan, no healthy cooking here! Even fresh veggies get a clear coat of grease on them when cooking. There are always desserts and no one ever goes hungry around a granny.

You can see, these are wonderful creatures and we have lost the art of making new ones. What a shame and I hope you all have access to one at least for a period of time in your life. You will walk away from the experience with an earthy, wholesome kind of love that is harder and harder to find in our fast paced, isolated, technical world.

I enjoyed learning many things from my project Granny these past 14 years, but I still can’t make a bread pudding.