Mawmaw Quotes

God created the world in seven days, but those days weren't necessarily twenty-four-hour days. Each one of His days might have been a million years long. Human time means nothing in the realm of Heaven, where clocks probably don't have hands, but golden arms, and the arms belong to God. On which day did the mammoth get created? It wasn't on the seventh day, since that was the day of rest. Quite possibly it came on the morning of the fifth an d went back out again the same afternoon. Thinking of creations come and gone in such a short amount of time makes Mawmaw sad.

I wasn’t looking at a tree; I was looking at a treasure chest. A mawmaw and a poppy, as his sister’s children called them. Aunts and uncles, not pictured, but no doubt close by, one of them holding the camera that had snapped this shot. Seven cousins—no, eight soon. His youngest sister was due in a few weeks, he’d said. Cousins who ranged from Digby’s own age to Lavender’s. Cousins who looked like Digby’s father. Cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents who knew what it was like to grow up in America with brown skin. They were spread across Georgia and Alabama and South Carolina, a host of relatives who didn’t have to shift their gaze to know when they’d crossed into the Second South. Relatives who always knew. Digby deserved to have them, these smiling human beings clustered tight together.

So, I guess the best place to start is to explain that my maternal grandmother, MawMaw Anderson, absolutely hated my mother. My mother is a piece of work, and MawMaw saw right through her even if my father absolutely did not.