(Another installment in the series of stories I tell June from my childhood.)

A visit to Granmunnie’s house

When Little Johnny was about eight or nine, he would ride the train, the Central of Georgia, from Adel to Macon and go visit his grandma—he called her Granmunnie—who lived in Gray. (Georgia Gray, as Johnny called it.)

Johnny got to ride the train because Granmunnie’s friend Mr. Green was a conductor, and he helped look out for Johnny on the trip.

Granmunnie lived in a big two-story house right in the middle of Gray, and worked as a social worker for the welfare department in Jones County. Johnny loved the house, though the upstairs, especially the room that was always locked at the top of the stairs, was a little scary. One day he climbed out the window of the landing onto the little porch roof and slipped down to look in the window of the locked room. He was kinda disappointed, though, because there was nothing but boxes and trunks and old manikins and piles of clothes in the room. No skeletons or ghosts or anything exciting!

He also loved going to work with Granmunnie at the courthouse annex, but the “trusties” who did yard work and janitorial work around the courthouse were a little scary too in their blue and white striped uniforms.

Johnny would get to ride with Granmunnie to visit some of her clients out in the county, and they would often stop at a peach orchard a friend of hers owned and she would walk out into the orchard and pick a few peaches and then she and Johnny would sit in her old 1940s Chevrolet and eat them.

They would visit a man who lived out in the middle of a pasture in a little shack he had made out of old signs and cardboard boxes, and a family who lived in an very old wooden house that was teetering on top of piles of rocks on a little clay hill. Johnny would try to talk to the kids who were sitting on the rickety old porch, but they never said much.

Sometimes while Granmunnie was working in her office, Johnny would go into the little county library that was in the same building and lie on the couch and read. He loved reading books about dogs, like Big Red, and one of his favorite characters, Augustus, and he even read some adult mysteries, including a lot of Perry Mason stories. (The Darby Trial was one mystery, which he read because he thought it was the Darby ‘trail’ not ‘trial,’ and he didn’t understand much of what was going on in it!.)

He and his Granmunnie had lime sherbet with Bubble-Up almost every day after supper, and Johnny still thinks of her whenever he sees lime sherbet.

Granmunnie’s house had a closed well on the back porch, but she never drew water from it. There was an old shed and a storage building in the back yard, which was all bare clay with a few oak leaves scattered around, and Johnny would get a rake and run around the back yard pulling the rake behind him to make tracks through the leaves.

There was also a very old, one-room house at the very back of the lot, just across an alley that ran through, and a woman who occasionally would cook or clean Granmunnie’s house lived there by herself. The old house had an open fireplace in it and the woman did all her cooking in the fireplace. Johnny remembers the way the house always smelled like wood smoke, because there was always a fire, even in the summer.

There was an old, old car in the shed that Uncle Dan had bought when he was young—maybe it even worked—and Johnny loved to sit in it and pretend to drive. It had wire wheels and no top, and Johnny thought it was just about the coolest thing he ever had seen!

The house was very mysterious to Johnny, because there were doors at several places outside that went under the house, which was higher off the ground than Johnny was tall! The whole thing was surrounded by old rusted iron fences that had very decorative, pointy things at the top of each post and gates that opened up into the alley at the side of the house.

When the visit was over, Granmunnie would drive Johnny in to the train station in Macon for his ride back to Adel. She always packed him a nice little lunch for the ride, and he enjoyed looking out the window while he ate.

One time, he had just finished his lunch when the conductor came through with a large garbage can calling out to the passengers for trash. Johnny wanted to get his lunch bag into the can, so he quickly rolled it up and tossed it in.

Just as the conductor pulled the trash out of the train car and started across the clattering, scary platform where the two cars were hooked together, Johnny realized that he had forgotten that in the bottom of his lunch sack were about four of his favorite cookies—Nabisco sugar wafers—and he had just thrown them away.

He was so disappointed and sad that he almost cried when he realized the cookies were gone. But it was too late to chase down the trash and get them back! Little Johnny remembers that trip—and his Granmunnie—every time he eats sugar wafers!