My grandmother came from Kentucky. Her speech showed that, and bits of her accent and turns of phrase carried forward to me occasioned comment for the first decades of my life.

Her educational achievements were unusual for her situation. She completed a year of college24 and then taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Kentucky. Her husband was very proud of these attainments. The value she placed on education made it natural that her eldest daughter would go to college, where the norm was that families stayed on the land. I believe it was an ingredient in Beverly's choice of a husband who would become an academic, though Connie was skeptical about about the academicism.

She was as unreserved as Beverly (in her early days) was shy, as garrulous as her husband was taciturn. At Christmastime, the nuns at St. Leo School would have a "visitor" in blackface who would fill the stockings of the "good" children with treats, but those of the "bad" children with coal, or even give them switchings. Connie would accompany her children on these days, standing ominously in the background with her arms folded.

When the children were not being good at home, Connie would announce, "That's enough, I've had it, I'm running away from home!" – and the two girls would cling to her skirts as she walked down the driveway, saying, "Oh no, mother, please don’t run away from home!"

My grandmother was more than abundantly good to me when I visited the farm, from providing iced drinks to borrowing cats for the occasion, who knows from where. (Who knows, for that matter, why the cats borrowed for the occasion chose to put up with me.) In my young mind, this goodness was inextricably wound up with the Edenity of the farm, and I'm afraid unappreciated by me as to agent, though certainly not as to the experience. Such is youth.