Louella Williams Nichols

Louella Williams Nichols, my grandmother, lived to be 93. I took this picture of her circa 1971.

My grandmother, Louella Williams Nichols, represented pure, unadulterated love to me. My parents loved me, of course, but Granny had none of their responsibilities for discipline, physical care and making sure we were raised right. Her job, as she saw it, was to love us unconditionally. Granny, to me, represented warm hugs, laughter and fun, and an energy and zest for life right up until her last months. She was essentially the only grandparent I knew. My grandfather Nichols died when I was very young, and both of my Dale grandparents died before I was born.

Born in 1892 in Washington County, Va., Granny was Southwest Virginia to her core. (For all of her life she pronounced the name of the county of her birth as WARSHington.) She married my grandfather, Horace Thomas Nichols, when she was just 14 years old, in 1906. She bore six children (one of whom, a daughter, died in early childhood when she choked on a piece of roast beef at a Sunday dinner at home). Her surviving children were Annie, Mary Helen (my mother), Louise, Joseph and Hazel.

She grew up on a farm, and before she and her young family eventually moved to Richmond, they still subsisted primarily on meat and vegetables that they raised and grew themselves, despite the fact that her husband had a job with the C&O Railway. She told me on several occasions that she used to take her infant children with her when she was tending to the crops, sometimes using an old apple crate as a bassinet. With no indoor plumbing, she told me, she had to walk to the spring at the bottom of the hill on which her house stood to fetch water by the bucket.

She never lost her farming skills. When I was a very young child, I remember seeing her take a live chicken, place its head on a stump, and chop it off with an axe. The headless chicken got up and ran around the yard until it died - a matter of a minute or less. (It's from this that we get the saying "running around like a chicken with its head cut off," meaning acting in a frantic and aimless manner.) The sight horrified me, but Granny hung that chicken on the clothesline by its feet and let the blood drain. Then she plucked it and fried it for dinner. Her favorite piece of fried chicken was what she called "the parson's nose" or, sometimes, "the part that goes over the fence last."

I remember vividly a time in early 1980 when my mother - who had always raised tomatoes, green beans, spring onions, butterbeans and cucumbers in our back yard - decided that the time had come, at age 66, to stop doing the back-breaking work of preparing by hand the 20-by-20-foot garden. Granny was visiting my mother, now a widow, that warm spring day and asked my mother when she planned to start her garden. My mother told her that she didn't think she was up to it. "Helen," Granny said, "give me the shovel and I'll dig it for you." My mother helped, but Granny did the lion's share of the work that day. So there was Granny, 88 years old, still digging in the earth to plant crops. She was quite a farm girl.

After she and her husband were separated, long after their children were grown, Granny lived in a large house on East Broad Street across from Chimborazo Park. I have next to no memories of that house, but I do remember when she and her youngest daughter, my Aunt Hazel, lived on Marshall Street across from Billups Funeral Home on Church Hill. The house is now gone, swallowed up by the old Nolde Brothers Bakery, which has since been sold and converted into condos. When Granny lived there, the bakery was still very much in operation, and I remember the comforting smell of baking bread permeating the house. Family lore has it that I was terrified by the sound of the noon whistle at the bakery. I don't remember being afraid, but I do recall the piercing sound of the steam whistle signaling lunchtime.

Granny and Aunt Hazel next lived on Oakwood Avenue, near Oakwood Cemetery on Church Hill. It was there, when I was about 6 or 7, that I accidentally killed Aunt Hazel's beloved parakeet. She often let it fly loose in the house, and I remember wanting to play with it. The parakeet flew into the folds of the dining room draperies and I went for it. Tragically, I didn't see that the bird had slipped from the draperies to the floor, and as I ran up to the window, I stepped on the bird. I cried almost as much as my Aunt Hazel.

After my Aunt Hazel married, Granny moved to the farm in Hanover to live with my Aunt Annie and Uncle Walter. Later, they moved to a new brick bungalow they built on Chamberlayne Avenue in Henrico County (which my Granny always pronounced Hen-WRECK-uh County). It was on the front porch of that house that the picture above was taken.

When Granny died at the age of 93 on Dec. 9, 1985, she had seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. She loved us all unconditionally, and we adored her in return.