I don’t have that many memories of my great grandmother, Mama Terry, as we called her, but the few that I have are precious to me. She made the best peanut butter cookies on planet earth. Fight me. I’m sticking with that argument. However good you think yours are, mine don’t even have to compete on taste. My Mama Terry’s peanut butter cookies compete on the impression they left on my soul. And I think I only remember her baking them three different times.
Another thing I remember her for was her beautiful home. A southern mansion style house built on the land that had been in our family for generations – all the way down to the living room that no one was allowed to go in, the Thanksgiving meals that included dozens of people, and even the shotgun houses down in the gully where the indentured servants used to live. All that was a part of her home.
I didn’t know Papa Terry; he died when I was two, I think. But their hike was a place where I loved to go. Since I grew up on military bases, a visit back “home” to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where my parents grew up, was always a chance to visit Mama Terry.
And when those visits were in the right season, she would let us pick a pomegranate from the tree out back. Now, that was a delicious and messy fruit. We never got more than one to share, but when you pluck one off the tree and cut it open – still warm from the Alabama sun, that was a treat worth having.
But that wasn’t the only fruit from my visits there. She used to tell me and my siblings stories from way back when. She was too fragile for us to sit on her lap, but we would sit on the floor in front of her rocking chair and she would sing the silliest song about a paw paw tree.
Where, oh where, is pretty little Susie?
Where, oh where, is pretty little Susie?
Where, oh where, is pretty little Susie?
Way down yonder in the paw paw patch.
Pickin up paw paws, puttin em in the basket.
Pickin up paw paws, puttin em in the basket.
Pickin up paw paws, puttin em in the basket.
Way down yonder in the paw paw patch.
I always lovers her singing it, and thought it was the silliest song. I never even slowed to wonder what a paw paw was, because it was just a silly song with happy memories.
When I was in my teens, I had the occasion to babysit my niece and nephew, and told them about Mama Terry’s song, and sang it to them. I remember my niece asking what that silly song was about. All I could tell her was “it’s about Susie getting paw paws in the paw paw patch, silly.”
Later while serving as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the Washington-Seattle mission, I was playing with these sweet children in the Lummi Indian reservation, I was singing Paw Paw Patch with them and they giggled and laughed so much. They sang it along with me, all just enjoying the fun of singing together. Later that evening, Sister Sawyer, a wonderful lady that reminded me of everything good in the world, asked me what was that song I was singing with the kids. I repeated the words and was a little surprised that such an experienced woman wouldn’t have k own that song. Surely, everyone should have known it. Doesn’t everyone have a Mama Terry?!
When I finished repeating the words of the song, Sister Sawyer asked “What’s a paw paw?”
Acting like the expert on all things southern, I explained it was a small fruit that only grows in the Deep South. “Y’all wouldn’t understand.” Sister Sawyer and her sweet daughter, Kim, laughed it off and I didn’t think of it again – until the next opportunity I had to sing with kids somewhere.
Not many years later I was happily married and having kids of my own. We had four of the most amazing boys. Garrett, Evan, Noah, and Elijah were and are the apple of my eye. In a world where I’ve truly missed the mark more than anyone I know, my Heavenly Father graciously gave me four sons that I love more than life itself. As they grew up, I played with them, hiked and camped with them, worshipped with them, and struggled with them. I only wish I had spent even more time with them.
But one thing I did do with them was sing the Paw Paw Patch song. From when Garrett was a new baby and laying on my lap while holding my thumbs with his tiny hands, to when Eli was a rambling kid playing “worker man” in the back yard, I must have sang Paw Paw patch with them a thousand times. Evan would watch me with wonder, though he may have been wondering if I had lost my mind singing about the paw paws.
As a side note, the boys’ southern cousins all referred to their grandfathers as their pawpaw, so the song may have been a bit confusing. Susie went to the pawpaw patch to pick them up and put them in a basket?! Ok!
The lore of the paw paw song was just something that made me happy and I enjoyed singing with kids because I enjoyed singing with Mama Terry when I was a kid. I didn’t know what a paw paw looked like or even if they were a real thing. And it didn’t matter. The song was epic. I could have gone to the library to look up the paw paw patch, maybe, but it just never occurred to me. Growing up, we had an Encyclopedia Britannica that I used regularly to look things up, and we had the local library. There was no home PC with an internet connection – that came just as I moved out. There were no mobile phones with all the knowledge in the world as the tap of a finger. So forgive me for not making a trip to the library just to learn about Mama Terry’s mythical paw paw patch.
Then one day the boys and their mom and I were on a day hike in a forest in South Carolina. We lived just north in Charlotte, North Carolina, and regularly went hiking and camping as a family. On this particular trip we had been hiking about an hour, had taken a break sitting on a log, and returned to walking through the forest. The trail wasn’t well maintained, but it was a clear enough path.
I noticed a sweet smell in the air, if you’ve been in an apple orchard in season, you know what I mean, but this didn’t smell quite like apples. We went a little further and found ourselves in a wild patch of the strangest kind. These odd trees had the strangest looking fruit on them. Some obviously had fallen to the ground but many were ripe and ready to be plucked. I wasn’t sure if these sweet smelling fruit were safe to eat, so I told the boys not to eat them. Then Noah started giggling about a small post with a sign on it. Some Boy Scout or forest ranger or someone had put those infamous sign posts in this forest to identify the tree types. This post had a wood placard that identified these as paw paw trees. “Just like the song, dad!” Noah said.
I couldn’t believe it. I stepped over to read the placard and was shaken by the simple identification of The Common Pawpaw (Asimina triloba). The song my Mama Terry had taught me all those years ago were not just a silly jingle. The Paw Paw was REAL!!!
My boys must have thought I was crazy with how excited I was! No matter how well I tried to explain the memories of how good Mama Terry’s peanut butter cookies or sun-warmed pomegranate were, I could not have explained the simple joy of her singing this silly song. And now, some 25 years later, I’d just learned that Susie really could have gone down to the paw paw patch and filled her basket with paw paws!
I was deeply delighted and then Garrett asked a second time: Can we eat them?
I had spent my life not knowing that paw paws were a real thing. We were not about to Not take a bite of these fruit. And oh my, they were so good! Not like an apple or a pear, but also not like a kiwi. Something in between. They were innocently sweet.
I think my family could tell how deeply it struck me, but I was just beginning to understand it myself. Of all the wild and weird and wonderful things I had experienced in my life, finding a paw paws patch on a hike with my family gave some validation to my childhood and some connection to my ancestors.
I still don’t know to this day if Mama Terry ever had a paw paw.