One thing I noticed at Thanksgiving dinner was how Grandma seems to be confused more and more about what’s going on around her. It’s mild, but noticeable. When she talks about the past, though, her face livens up and she recounts every detail as though it were yesterday.

We started talking about the Great Depression, and Grandma told me about a time before the TVA flooded part of their land to make the lake now in front of her rural Tennessee home. She pointed out where two old country stores once stood deep in the middle of the lake. She slowly traced the tree line of the hills across the cove outlining what property was theirs and where an old road led to the one room school she went to called Mt. Olivet. There is nothing but an old pot-bellied stove in the woods now where the school once stood.

Everything they ate as kids Grandma said came directly from the land we were on. She said her siblings knew about the Great Depression but they weren’t that affected because they were so poor to begin with. Grandma told me her father would make the toys they played with. Some of her favorites were the dolls he’d make out of corn husks using the long golden tassel for hair.

The dolls wouldn’t last very long, but Grandma said she still had at least one toy her father made for her. We went downstairs where Grandma pointed to stuff hanging in the rafters, and there it was. She called it a “flutter mill.” Grandma said her father probably made the word up, but showed me how it would sit in the creek and turn with the flowing water like a mill.