Shit, Fire and Damnation

Posts

It Will All Come Out in the Wash

The last blog I posted was about sh*t shows at our family’s house during the holidays. If you got the impression that the Price family only puts on these sh*t shows in the comfort of their own home and are generally reserved in public, I’m delighted to tell you that you are wrong. Nope, we can get full-on wild in grocery stores, on the highway, funerals, weddings, hospitals…annnd the workplace. My grandmother and grandfather have always had an amazing work ethic that they passed down to their children and their children’s children. We know how to hustle and get things done. My grandparents grew up in the time when the manufacturing industry was alive and well. Mamaw was working a job in a factory when she came home from work with both of her thumbs bandaged straight up in the air. When asked what happened, she said a snake bit her. Apparently she had been working on a line and a lady down the line from her was talking some smack to my grandmother. If you know my grandm...

Sh*t Shows

If you have read the previous posts in this blog, then you will likely understand that the Price family has never been scared to cause a scene. Holidays and special occasions are no exception. When Mamaw and Papaw first moved back to North Carolina, they moved into a hundred-year-old two story, green house. The house was rumored to be where the people from the nearby mill village would go to play poker. The whole family swore that the house was haunted, and that there was parts of the house that they didn’t even like going in. One year, in the early 80’s, my grandparents, and my mom and aunts and uncles, were sitting down to have Thanksgiving dinner when they realized the house had caught on fire. Everyone but my grandpa ran down to the neighbor’s house for safety. Not long after, my grandpa came rolling down the neighbor’s driveway in his pickup truck, with the big screen TV in the back. The house burned all the way down, with everything inside- minus the big screen TV. Phot...

A Mouse Did It

A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit Mamaw and Papaw so that I could listen to their stories and add to the blog. I said, “Mamaw, what do you want to talk about next?” Without missing a beat, she said, “Shit” (affirmation that this blog is appropriately titled). So that’s what this one is going to be about. Shit. Mamaw worked in nursing homes and hospitals for many years. She also spent some time taking care of elderly people. The irony here is that Mamaw has a highly sensitive gag reflex, especially concerning shit. I remember one time when I was a kid, my little sister, Darrenee, went into the bathroom at Mamaw’s and just shit everywhere. There was shit on the walls, on the floor. Just everywhere. Mamaw went into the bathroom, saw it, and immediately started wretching. Mamaw doesn’t wretch like a normal person, it’s loud and violent. It’s also hysterical to the rest of our family. She was wretching so hard that it made me laugh whilst cleaning up all my sister’s poo. Mamaw wil...

Howl at the Moon

I think I am going to start this post off with a dirty little family secret. A minimum of the last three generations of my family have all been suckers for romance novels. Most of us like all books in general, but there’s nothing like a good, raunchy romance novel or epic drama. When I visited with Mamaw last week we pulled up the list of all the V.C. Andrews novels ever published and Mamaw told me she owned most of them, and had read all of them. One of my favorite things to do with my mother is to talk about books we have read. When I was a kid I used to sneak her romance novels off the shelf, until eventually she just started handing them to me when she was finished. This could be a possible explanation as to why we are all prone to have fits of passion. Or it could just be in the blood. When Mamaw was a small child, her father’s relatives and friends used to say that she had the devil in her eyes. She told my mom that she would spend hours looking in the mirror, trying to find the...

Break the Rules

Charlotte (Mamaw) and her sister Pete I need to make a correction regarding the first post. Mamaw told me that she wasn’t naked up on the second floor, that it was actually the first floor. They only went out on the second story roof, she said, to turn the beans they were drying out. So the more appropriate title for the previous post should be ‘Out on the Porch’ rather than ‘Up on the Roof’. But the correction made me start thinking about the house itself. Mamaw said the house in Butler, Maryland was great big, so big that it housed three families. When most people think of Maryland, they picture Baltimore and imagine life in the city. Although Butler is not far from Baltimore, it is much more rural, probably even more so in the 40's and 50's. Still today, there are only a few businesses in Butler, including a saddlery. The rest is residential and farmland. However, Butler was home for some of the wealthiest people in the state during that time, like the Worthington fa...

Up on the Roof

Up on the Roof ‘Mamaw’ might seem like a strange word to some folks, especially those that are not from the American South. However, ‘Mamaw’ was not only a common word to me and my thirteen first cousins, but a precious word attached to and associated with a precious person. Let’s be clear though, the word ‘precious’ may give you the implication that I am referring to someone who is fragile or delicate. This is actually quite opposite of the truth. Precious, in reference to Mamaw, indicates a rare sort of free-spirited, adventurous, fierce woman that is loved by more people than I can possibly count. Sure, my cousins and I looked to Mamaw for love and support, but we also looked to her when we needed someone to raise hell for us. She was our champion. She taught our parents how to be champions for us, and us to be champions for our kids. She taught us how to have fun, embrace our wildness, speak our minds, dance and laugh. This past Christmas, my mother asked me to write my g...