Longevity

My dad was in the Air Force until I was about 13 years old, and so we grew up away from our extended family.  We saw grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins at Christmas time and over summers, but rarely any other times.

Going to see Mama and Papa Dee, my mom's parents, was always a special treat.  It wasn't that we didn't like our other grandparents, but there was just something different about going to their house.  My brother would always say, when we walked in the door, "This house has that Drummond smell."  It smelled like tomatoes and peaches and chocolate frosting and fresh EVERYTHING.  

Papa always had a garden with tomatoes, okra, cucumbers, squash, green beans, corn and every other good thing, and Mama Dee canned them all, preserved them, cooked and served them up with a heaping teaspoon of love (and maybe some bacon fat).

They had acres of land on which to play unencumbered by the worry of passing cars or strangers.  They had a full-color console TV that played Little Rascals and Three Stooges.  Papa would pay us 10 cents a bag for raking leaves, a job that took all day and yielded a dollar between us.  We would promptly run to the Circle C down the road and buy RC colas and smoke bombs.  It was just flat fun.

Today is their anniversary.  They've been married a million years.  Today.  Or 67.  It's hard to separate the two.