We have lived in downtown Villa Rica for three years now....and that has been pretty much three years of bliss. One of the first things I noticed, when we were contemplating putting an offer on this house, was the fact that there's a railroad track running right through the middle of town. Several people asked me if the train would bother me. I would smile and say, "Never!" I am inexplicably linked to many trains in my memory, and they are all good ones. Starting with MawMaw. I had the privilege of two wonderful Grandmothers when I was growing up. They were as different as night and day, but both of them left an indelible place on my heart. I miss them and often get a little misty, wondering if they can see the lives that now blossom because of them.
MawMaw was my Daddy's mother. She grew up in the South, very, very poor. For most of her life, she had the uncertainty of not knowing for sure if she was going to make it through. She married young, a man who turned out to be less than stellar, a man who neglected his family, drank away the moon, and basically abandoned his post, but they still managed to have eight children together. She would say to me, "You know, I loved that man." She worked in the fields doing manual labor to keep food on the table. My Daddy was the eighth child. When I got pregnant with our third son, Jesse, MawMaw called me up and fussed at me....that I'd end up "an old cow like her, having a baby every other year" (her words). I said to her, "MawMaw, if you had had only seven kids, you wouldn't have had my Daddy and he is the best one and I know you are proud of him." We got off the phone, but she called me back a couple of days later and apologized to me for her harsh words. She remarked that she had never thought about it that way. We had a good laugh and told how much we loved each other. She died peacefully, a coffee cup in her hand and a smile on her face, in her recliner, the very next day. Did she know she was about to leave this world? I don't know. She has blessed me all of my life, even in her sometimes blustery ways, and even though she's not here anymore.
She had an ancient house in downtown Smyrna, more of a shack than a house. I remember it vividly. It had an attic upstairs, where us kids would sleep if we stayed over. There were these impossibly steep stairs, with a room to either side. It was a little spooky, with a hole in the wall going to the nether parts of the house. I was always nervous about that hole, dreaming of the big rats and ghosts that surely lived in there. We would hunker up with our cousins (I had dozens of those), telling stories and playing card games. MawMaw had an old chamber pot, in case you had to go to the restroom in the night. It was a toss-up between negotiating those stairs in the pitch dark and dealing with the pot. Usually you just tried to wait until morning. But the scariest part of sleeping in the attic was the midnight train. The tracks were right next door, and when one came through, the house shook, the windows rattled, and you were certain it had jumped the tracks and was coming through the middle of the house. I remember having that feeling you have in the midst of a scary movie -- a mix of fear, horror and delight. Then relief that you didn't die.
The railroad tracks next door were a source of immense curiosity to us kids. We would walk on them, lay pennies on them so the train would flatten them (despite well-meaning aunts who would tell us that we would derail the train if we did that), and cross over them to the shopping center that was on the other side. We would scrounge for Coke bottles and take them up to the grocery store, where they'd give us a nickel for every bottle we brought in. We'd then trudge down the road to G.B.'s Diner, which was also right on the tracks, and get triple scoops of ice cream for fifteen cents. The fella would give us gigantic scoops, almost more than the cone would hold. As an adult, I wonder if the guy was feeling sorry for us poor, barefoot urchins who were covered with dirt and sweat from all the playing we had done that day. Either way, those are sweet memories and simple pleasures I will never forget. Our cousin, Joe, was particularly brazen about the trains. He became a legend when he hopped one of them and took off to worlds unknown. My Aunt Ellen whipped out of the yard with her car, sped down Atlanta Road and pulled right onto the tracks and stood on top of her car to make the train stop. It did! What a sassy gal. Thank God for sassy gals.
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