Ninny and Poppa

Ninny and Poppa lived in an old, white clapboard farmhouse on a hill in Yocona, a rural community near Oxford, Mississippi. As an adult, I have mixed feelings about that house, and sometimes about the people who lived there, but it was the one constant in my life. It still stands there today and my family still lives in it. I haven’t been there since Poppa died, though, and I have no plans to visit any time soon.

Poppa was a farmer. The house sat in the middle of several acres that he tended to carefully. As far as I know, he never took a day off. Ninny tended to their four children. Aunt Paula was the oldest. The twins, my Aunt Maggie and Uncle Richard, came next. My father was the youngest.

I don’t know Maggie and Richard very well. They both left home right after high school – before I was born. Maggie started nursing school but married a doctor before she finished. They live in Denver and seem to have a very nice life. Richard went to business school. He’s a corporate executive in Dallas. Or is it Houston? When I was younger, they always came home for Christmas. Now they only come home for funerals and I haven’t seen either of them since Poppa died.

Paula and my father were much more dysfunctional, and much less successful. Neither of them ever strayed very far from home. I realize now that Ninny and Poppa enabled them. Ninny mothered her children until they left. For the two that never did, she just continued mothering them like there was nothing wrong with it. As for Poppa, well, he just did what Ninny wanted. I never witnessed any opposition on his part.