A few months ago, I re-posted some of my Texan grandmother’s expressions. Since then, my sister and I have thought of a few more that circulated in our family. Two or three are Granny’s, but more are our mom’s: You sound like a dying cow in a hailstorm. Said to a whining child — i.e.,, when I was a kid, . . .
Although my mother was his only surviving child, her father always said he had another during his first marriage. He implied that the baby died as an infant, Mom says; in fact, I discovered this weekend, the little girl lived nearly six years. My grandfather, Robert Bruce, was seventeen when he wed Nettie Mason, then sixteen, in May, 1925. A . . .
Recently I remembered a compilation of my granny’s (pictured) sayings that appeared online in 2003 on a site that’s since gone to internet heaven. I managed to dig up the list, so here are the “Favorite Expressions of My Deceased (and Beloved) Texan Grandmother, with Explanations”: 1. He looked at me like a calf at a new gate. Translation: “Even . . .
Charles William Bruce, otherwise known in la casa de Maud as the great-grandfather who killed a man with a hay hook, has always been one of the most compelling characters in my personal deck of Notorious Ancestor Playing Cards. And now he’s the second forbear — his wife Rindia being the first — to whom I owe an apology. June . . .