My grandfather Don (whose first name was Walter) said that the first time he saw his future wife, he was working in his father’s bank and “she came tripping in like a little quail”.

My grandmother left her own family and moved in with her cousin Beulah and Beulah’s parents when she was young.  She was a bit of a Cinderella figure with her new family but stayed close with her cousin. 

When Beulah passed in the 1970s, she left much of her estate to my grandmother.  One item was a book called A Treasury Of The Familiar, a collection of poems, songs, essays, political addresses, Bible passages and pithy sayings. My grandmother, whom we called Nema (and whose first name was George, which she didn’t like; and middle name was Louise, which she did) appreciated that book and made notes and circled passages that she liked.  

On June 3, 1979, she inscribed the book to me as a going away present since I was graduating and moving to Cincinnati to launch my business career.  However, she thought I was too busy and distracted when I stopped by to say goodbye so she didn’t give it to me then.  In 1986, she made a second inscription to me but for some unknown reason she didn’t give it to me then either.

When she passed away in 2007, her daughter, my Aunt Kaye, mailed me the book of which I had been previously unaware.  I opened it and saw the inscriptions and flipped through the pages to find notes in her handwriting.  Next to the song “Little Brown Jug”, she said “my mother used to sing this to me when I was small…it must be very old”.  Through this book, Nema spoke to me from the other side and I still hear her kind and loving voice when I read the words.

One of Nema’s specialties was melt-in-your-mouth pot roast so naturally pot roast is in the song.