You're Welcome

Quick update:
Friday night, my dad, his girlfriend, and I drove up to Johnson City where my grandparents live. Their house is on top of a huge hill that used to be surrounded on three sides by woods for as far as you cared to walk, but over the years subdivisions have been moving in closer and closer, and there's even a radio tower in the front yard. My grandmother says the thing gives her home a commercial look and she hates it.

Its the same house that my father grew up in, and I sleep in his old room when I'm there. Looking out a window at an old tree and the most stars I've ever seen. My dad used to shoot out the only street light at the top of the hill so that he could see the stars better. Stories of raising cattle and pork, and farming tobacco fill every empty space in conversation.

My grandparents go affectionately by Maw and Paw to all eight grandchildren. Maw will fix you a grilled ham and cheese before you've expressed that you're dying for one. She cooks and sews with a kind of patience I've never known, and East Tennessee is the only place I feel alright about working in the kitchen while the men watch the Kentucky Derby in the living room. Paw had polio as a child, beat it, fought in Vietnam, and has loved my grandmother for 50 years.

At dinner (fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, corn, and butter), Maw talks nostalgically about how she never used to lock the front door, and Dad and Paw joke about a nearly fatal copperhead snake incident that ended with my father on top of a swing set, and Paw, standing over the freshly killed snake, squeezing out it's venom with a garden hoe. Just out of curiosity.