In the past couple years my mom has taught me and reminded me of a few more of my Texan granny’s favorite expressions. Some highlights: Quiet as a little mouse peeing on cotton. (Usually used when someone reacts with stunned silence to some sort of diatribe or revelation.) You can’t get all your coons up one tree. (You can’t get everything you want.) Told them how . . .
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, . . .
Whatever I paid to search the Dallas Morning News archives last month allowed me access to something like 50 articles, but only for 24 hours. So after I found what I was looking for (confirmation that one of my mom’s father’s wives really did shoot him), and had exhausted all possible searches on the subject, I typed in other Texan . . .
The last time I visited my mother, she had sixteen or seventeen dogs. During my high school years, there were also birds. Hundreds of them. And before she met my father, she kept more than thirty cats in a small apartment. She was encouraged in these animal hoarding tendencies from a young age. Mom was five when my grandmother, who . . .
As far as I can tell, some twenty-odd years after the events of Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and about eight years before the novel appeared, my great-grandfather was hired to manage the plantation Welty fictionalized in it. The book is set in September 1923, at Shellmound, just north of Greenwood, Mississippi. Very little happens in Delta Wedding, and apparently that was intentional. . . .