Country wisdom . . . and humor

From our marriage in 1971 to the first decades of the 21st Century, I was exposed to a milieu with which I was totally unfamiliar.  That was the yearly Thanksgiving gathering of my husband's mother's family on farmland just outside of Darien, Georgia, that had been in the family since before the Civil War.  Their home was a simple dogtrot built about a hundred years before.  Modern conveniences had been added through the years.  For decades, my husband's grandmother had cooked meals for her large family in a tiny galley.  One Christmas, the children all chipped in and gave their mother a gift that kept on giving: they enlarged and modernized the kitchen.  These were country folk, descendants of Scots-Irish settlers of Georgia.  They had a strong sense of family, and it took time both for me to be accepted by them and for me to get used to their ways.  But there were moments when their plain-spoken words made me laugh.

One of those times was when my husband and I and our two daughters, both adults, were sitting on the porch that ran almost the length of one side of the house, in southern tradition, talking about all sorts of things.  One of the things under discussion on that day was a dog my husband's parents had some years before.  She was a Black Apple-Headed Chihuahua named Weejee.  The aunts were on and on about that "nasty little rat dog."  Our daughters defended the little dog's memory.  "We loved Weejee; she was a good dog."  One of the aunts put her view of the relationship between our daughters and the dog in simple terms that had us laughing.  "Of course she was good to you.  You was her grandpuppies!"