happy weekend

Like we say back home

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, . . .

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The mysterious life of my mother’s half-sister

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 . . .

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Happy weekend from the archives: talking Texan

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 . . .

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Happy weekend from the hay hook killer

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 . . .

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