Tales of the House

I think I would love to have known the woman who lived in this house.  At closing, her granddaughter regaled us with stories of a woman who I simply fell in love with.  Clearly, her family also loved her.

She lived in this house for 46 years and, prior to that, lived in another house nearby for another long stretch.  She was, I believe, 94 when she died last spring.  Married at 14 (common in those days) to the only man her father would allow her to date, Miz Adair was by all accounts 'a pistol'.  Her grandkids and great-grandkids grew up in and around this house, and selling it was tough for the family.

A few years back the family church had a schism -- somebody split with the money for a new church and a bunch of the membership to form a new church.  Those that were left wanted to go ahead with their building project and Miz Adair and one of her friends raised $114,000 by selling Chicken & Dressing and Coconut Cake out of the back door of this house!  Apparently, both were rather legendary.  I'm talking about the food, but I tend to think that Miz Adair, if not her friend, was also a bit legendary around here.  The granddaughter has the recipes for both and has promised to share.  Yum.

She apparently felt that three drops of sewing machine oil could cure many of the world's ills.  An exaggeration, of course, but among the cleaning items and such that the sellers left in the cupboards was a container of sewing machine oil.  Miz Adair used it to move the stove, refrigerator, washer and dryer so she could clean behind them.  Three drops of machine oil right in front of the front 'feet' of the appliances, and they'd glide smoothly.  She used this right up til the end and the family suspects that she was doing this when she fell a few years ago, but she would never cop to it.

I mentioned how well the family had cared for the house over the years, and the granddaughter laughed.  "She made sure we did", she said.  "She'd be on the phone to me anytime something needed attention." And my guess is that Miz Adair wasn't somebody to be ignored.

I wish I could have known her.