Maudie May

Maude May Perdue was her name, Maudie May to those who knew her. She was always waiting on the front porch of her white house for our arrival. When the last person was out of the car, she would lead us into the warm kitchen, and there she would sit in a child-size chair by the fire. This was her place, and from here she would proceed to captivate her audience.
Maude’s hair was snowy white and held in place by a thin spider web net matching the color of her hair. She wore rimless glasses from which she could periodically peak over the top to check the attentiveness of her audience. Her skin was fair, and her blues eyes sparkled with life’s forgotten youth. The plain, simple housedress she wore reflected the casualness of her manner; her bosom drooped slightly, resting on the band of her apron. She had a deformed fingernail on her right hand, the result of some childhood mishap. She often used this deformity to illustrate a moral lesson to a misbehaving child. As a result, no one knew how this injury had actually occurred for the details were altered to fit the moral lesson needed at the time. There was always a bruise or two on her thin legs from some encounter with an inanimate object, and her shoes were molded to the bunions on her feet.
As we gathered around the table In her kitchen, we would stuff ourselves with the cream pies, fruit cobblers and other culinary favorites made exclusively for each visitor while Maudie entertained us with stories of her girlhood days. As she talked she would become so enthralled with her story that she would rock the little chair back and forth until each of us held our breath for fear she would topple backward to the wooden floor below. Her enthusiasm for storytelling never wavered and she enjoyed nothing more than to see the gapping jaws of her audience as they gasped in reaction to her tales. None of us ever knowing for certain what was fiction or what was fact.
One of her favorite stories was how she met her husband Dean. She would tell of the Sunday picnic after church when she and one of her girlfriends were invited to join two young men in their boat for fishing. Maudie indicated this was not a proper outing since working on the Sabbath was not considered the thing to do but she relinquished and climbed into the boat though she didn’t know how to swim.
As the two young women and their suitors began to row near the shore looking for a suitable place to drop their lines Maudie’s bonnet caught on a tree limb causing her to lose her balance and fall backward into the lake. Maudie immediately began to thrash about in the water promising God that if he spared her from drowning she would never again fish on Sunday. Quickly Dean dove into the water and rescued the repenting Maudie May. She in turn married her rescuer. She told this story with such detail that one almost expected to see her bonnet and dress dripping by the fire.
All too soon the sun would settle beneath the kitchen window indicating it was time to depart. Maudie would instinctively rise from her little chair to walk us to the porch; and it was there, I would kiss Maudie May, my grandmother, good-bye.