Ethyl's musing about grandparents

When I was growing up in the fifties and early sixties every Sunday afternoon was spent visiting my maternal grandparents. They were an old couple who lived high on a hill in an old breezeway house. For those of you who don't know what kind of house that is, let me explain. In those days air conditioners did not exist, so many people in that day and time put a breezeway down the center of their homes. It was also referred to as a dog trot house. The rooms were built on either side of the breezeway and there were doors leading into each of the rooms. My mother said in the summer they would throw down mattresses and sleep out in the breezeway where they could get the cool night air. All the way across the front of the house was a long porch with big old rocking chairs like the ones you find at Cracker Barrel, and what I remember about my grandfather was that his ample body could fill up one of those chairs. He had a laugh to match his rotund body. Hardy, deep, and resonating from the very heart of his soul. The visiting family would all gather on the front porch in the warmer months and in the front room around it's massive fireplace in the winter.
The Sunday afternoon conversation would for the most part center on the current aches and pains of the aunts and what they had put up (canned or frozen) from their gardens that week and so forth and so on. Which ever relative did not show up was usually the topic of conversation, so most of the shrew ones made sure they came. I always felt so sorry for Aunt Fanny. She had never been sick a day in her life. She had never been in the hospital and had never had an operation so when they all got together, she never had a thing to talk about. One of the main features of those Sunday afternoon family sessions on the front porch was the Old Irish Men stories. They always began with 'two old Irish men going down the road'. I thought it was interesting they were never Chinese or Italian or English men, but always Irish. Thinking back on it, I suppose it had to do with our Irish American roots. Anyway, they were funny, and I can still remember a great many of them.