I don’t come from a long line of tall people. In fact, most of the women I admire in my family shrink with age. It’s almost as if it’s a right of passage. For instance, my great aunt Nell was probably 4 feet 10 when she passed. God, I miss that woman. She was a spitfire. She used to sing old Johnny and June Cash songs with her boyfriend Dewey (her husband had passed many years prior). They’d sing to the top of their lungs in a key that most of us didn’t even know existed. She laughed. She lived. I even saw Jesus one time when I was with her in Chilton County. We were all riding around (aunts, grandmother, dad, her). We looked up and there was a man in what looked like to be dressed in a white robe and had long hair walking in the distance. When we saw him, she said, “I always knew Chilton County was God’s country.” There you go. If Aunt Nell said it, it must be true, and we all saw him! Since, I’m 5 foot 1, I think I am headed in the right direction- shrink a few inches and don’t give a hoot about what other people say.

I’ve been given a gift, the gift of time. Time to spend with my kids, time to write, time to cook. I don’t know what’s going on with me. I have made a dessert every weekend for 4 weekends straight, adding a fifth today-lemon tarts. Maybe, I’m becoming the Southern woman I’ve always been meant to be. Now, I’m not crazy. I can’t whip something up; I have to read instructions but it’s been so satisfying to see something from start to end and that I’ve created. If it’s a fruit, you best bet, I’m gonna figure out how to cook it. Thank God for Google.

With God’s gift of time, I’ve decided to spend once a week with my granddad- ask questions, learn. Give him my time which at this point in his life and even mine is important. I don’t know where this journey will lead us. I just learned recently about a candy dish he won at a cake walk when he was 8. He still has it. And the green bowl, he cooks his eggs in every morning, it was his mother’s. He estimates she had in the 1920’s. These things are important to him. He has a story to tell, just like the rest of us. It will be my job to tell his.

What we choose to do with our time will eventually reveal who we are in the end.

I hope how I choose to use mine helps someone- if not today, down the road. I hope they remember that how we measure someone cannot be defined in height, looks, status or size but by the impact they had on others.

My grandfather Herbert Eugene “Red” Hall