My favorite picture of us: Thanksgiving, Circa 1988 ~ Pam, Nannie, Mother, and Me
Martha Jane Tignor Whitlock, 8-16-10~11-2-99
Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.
The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil.
She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.
She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.
She is like the merchants' ships; she bringeth her food from afar.
She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens.
She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.
She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms.
She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her candle goeth not out by night.
She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff.
She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy.
She is not afraid of the snow for her household: for all her household are clothed with scarlet.
She maketh herself coverings of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple.
Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land.
She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant.
Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come.
She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness.
She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.
Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.
Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.
Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.
Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates.
~Proverbs 31:10-31
http://youtu.be/GHbOBNaERco Oh, Had I A Golden Thread~Eva Cassidy
http://youtu.be/lOqAtTYlWmQ How Can I Keep From Singing~Eva Cassidy
http://youtu.be/fVPDrZypPM4 Sweet Hour of Prayer Hymn [My grandmother's favorite hymn]
I had the best grandmother!
I know that’s a grand statement to make, but I did. There is one instance when the word “best” is allowed to be used multiple times in reference to the same idea: when a child is speaking about their grandparent! My grandmother being the best does not negate your grandmother from being the best. Normally, it would, but, as I said, this is the one instance when it is the exception to the rule.
You might be wondering what it was about my grandmother that made her the best? The easiest answer is, what didn’t? My father thought she was a saintly woman. Like the rest of us, he held her in the highest esteem. Open praise like that from my father was a big deal. I remember the first time I ever read Proverbs 31, verses 10-31, my mouth dropped open slightly and I thought to myself, “Wow! My grandmother is referenced in the BIBLE!”
Her life wasn’t an easy one, and when I say that, I don’t mean that she grew up impoverished or suffered abuse. What I mean when I say that about my grandmother is that there wasn’t a lot of frivolity in her life. She was the eldest daughter of 13 children, and many of those children she helped raise. [Her brothers and sisters held her in the highest regard too.] She was always working. Always!
She was a farmer’s wife and a mother to two of her own children. Not only did she have the full-time and exhausting responsibilities of running a farming household, she also worked a regular 40-hour a week job in the meat department at Thalhimer’s in Richmond for years. I do not know how she managed it all? I think about it sometimes, and am exhausted just by the thought.
By the time she went to work in the morning, she’d already put in a half-day’s work at her home. Think about that for just a moment. By the time her head hit the pillow at night to say her prayers, she’d put in another. Her hands were never idle. Never~ever. Well, except when she slept. Does that count as idleness?
If she took time to sit down, she always had a pan in her lap to snap peas or some sewing that needed to be finished. Her one guilty pleasure was reading.
My grandmother was a magician of sorts. She never wasted a thing. She re-purposed anything that she could. They were farmers. It’s what they did. They made the best of what they had, and they got the most out of the things they had. She could take nothing special and turn it into something amazing. Case in point: back when my mother was a little girl, feed sacks came in floral bags. Why? I don’t know, but my grandmother didn’t discard those. She washed them, then cut them out, sewed them together and made lovely blouses out of them for my mother and aunt. She was a top notch seamstress, and the clothes she made rivaled anything we bought in the store. Also, back during the depression, when times were really tough, she could take a basic household ingredient like vinegar and turn it into a dessert...something akin to a lemon pie. I never cared for Vinegar Pie but my grandfather, mother and brother loved it! She was the best cook too! Lord, that woman could cook! A friend of mine’s father swears that my grandmother’s vegetable soup healed him of his heart problems. I’m not kidding. Who knows? Everything she cooked, she made with love. It’s possible. Love is healing.
She chuckled when I called her and told her that Mr. Dillon thanked her for the soup, and said that she could make it for him anytime, because it had healed his heart. She didn’t know about that, but she appreciated the compliment.
She was an example to me of gentility and grace. She had both; she WAS both. My grandmother was a southern “lady”. She was gentile yet strong, and that is a formidable combination. I never heard a vulgar word EVER cross her lips. She did not participate in gossip. She always gave someone the benefit of the doubt. She didn’t tolerate “foolishness” as she called it. She didn’t like “fussing” among the grandchildren.
I admired her so much. I don’t think I could have lived her life with ½ of the dignity and grace that she lived it or 1/10th the stamina. She had 53 years on me, and the woman could run circles around me — even in her later years when she had lost portions of both of her legs, she could still run circles around me! We tease my mother about being the Energizer Bunny because SHE never slows down, but my grandmother was the original. My mother comes by it naturally. It skipped a generation with me. I don’t have the energizer bunny trait!
Life dealt her some tough blows later in her life. She developed some health problems, but I never heard her complain about it. Not “why me”? She didn’t grumble when her diet was restricted to excluded certain things, and I can tell you right now, I wouldn’t have just complained, I would have wailed over such a restriction. My friends across the country would have been able to hear my wailing, but not my grandmother. She accepted her fate without a bitter pout. It reinforced a lesson that she’d instilled in me when I was a young girl. She had told me once that everybody has problems in their life, and if we all laid our troubles out on a table for everybody else to see, we’d gladly pick up our lot and go about our merry way. She truly lived that philosophy.
Her illness progressed, and she wasn’t able to stave off the reality that she was going to lose part of her leg. She handled it like a champ! She was amazing like that. Rise above. Rise above. That’s what she did. If life gave her a challenge, she saw it as an opportunity to rise above. Nothing ever shook her faith — on the contrary, her life-challenges brought her closer to God.
There were only two times I recall ever seeing her cry: when my granddaddy died, and when her illness progressed to the point that she knew they were going to have to take part of her other leg.
By that time, we lived in Maryland – just two hours away, and my sister and I would drive down sometimes and spend the weekend with my grandparents, and after Granddaddy passed, we took turns and each took a weekend and went down to spend with her. I remember going to see her before she had the operation on her second leg.
“You okay, Nannie?”
“Well, Dahlin’,” she said in her soft voice that I can still hear in my mind.
But, when she said, “Dahlin’”, she got a little overcome with it all, and her voice broke. She lowered her head, and I knew that tears had come.
I reached my hand out to her, and she took it.
“It’s going to be okay,” I assured.
She just nodded, and we didn’t speak of it again. It’s a hard thing to lose pieces of yourself — to have a doctor cut parts of your body off bit by bit and reduce you to a place of dependence on others, when you’ve never done that in your entire life. It’s humbling. It’s not that my grandmother didn’t know how to be humble. She just didn’t like to be dependent. She had always carried her weight, and she knew without her legs to aid her, she was going to need serious help. She didn’t want to be a burden. We all assured her that a burden was something that she would never be. She was grace realized and grace is never a burden...
Did I say with parts of both of her legs removed, she could still run circles around me? Here is my funny story about that. This happened before I was married so I must have been about 30, and my grandmother was in her mid 80's. I had gone down for the weekend in the summer, and as I was coming in, her sister, my Aunt Myrtle was leaving. I heard her tell my grandmother that the corn had not come in yet.
Aunt Myrtle KNEW Nannie could run circles around her too.
Anyway, after she’d left, I looked at my grandmother and said, puzzled. “She needs her eyes checked! There’s a ton of corn out there.”
“What?” My grandmother asked, in disbelief.
I nodded. “There’s at least six rows of corn out there!”
Let me paint this picture: these were LONG rows of corn.
Nannie wanted to see for herself, so I helped her up out of the wheelchair over to the door. Proud of myself, I waved in the direction of the incoming corn.
“See?”
“Well, how do you like that?” my grandmother said, not certain what to make of my Aunt Myrtle’s comment. {I NOW know what was intended by it! ;-) }
“Come on,” my grandmother said. “Let’s eat real quick, cuz you’re going to need to go out there and pick it for me.”
Clue number one regarding Aunt Myrtle’s inability to recognize plain-as-day grown corn.
“Okay,” says I, the dumb cluck.
Nannie and I got supper on the table and cleaned the kitchen. Let me just say that I’m normally tired out by the time I’ve done this....tacked onto that chore, the couple-hour drive down from Maryland, and the chores I’d already done at home before I’d left, and I was ready to go sit in the den and take a load off — relax. No. That would not be the routine for that evening. I had some rows of corn to pick.
My grandmother directed me to the two large handled buckets by the freezer to use, and she pulled out a bunch of small plastic pans that she lined on the kitchen table along with the garbage can.
“What’s that for?” I, the dumb cluck, asked, still having no clue what I’d set myself up for.
“You pick it and bring it in to me, and I’m going to shuck it.”
I nodded. That sounded fair.
“Okay,” I replied, taking the buckets and heading out to the fields. It wasn’t that I’d never not picked corn before, I’d just never picked it by myself — ALL by myself.
I picked and I picked and I picked and I picked some more. I hauled bucket after bucket after bucket up to the house, and that was just on row one. It dawned on me at row two why my Aunt Myrtle had said what she’d said. I noticed that SHE wasn’t outside at seven o’clock at night picking corn and hauling it back to the house all by HERSELF.
By the end of the second row, I was calling out to God: “Lord. Have mercy!”
Had I told my grandmother six rows? I still had four rows to go — four LONG-ass rows! [Yeah, I told you I wasn’t gentile like my grandmother.]
What amazed me was that my grandmother had this corn shucked faster than I could bring it in to her. Did I mention Energizer Bunny?
By the end of row four, my back hurt so bad, it felt like it was about to break in two, and I needed something to drink. I was hot, sweaty and exhausted.
“I need some tea!” I informed as I went into the house without a bucket full of corn.
My grandmother looked surprised that I had brought no offering of corn with me AND that I had the audacity to sit down to take a load off of my weary self, when there was still MUCH to do.
“Don’t take too long, Dahlin’,” she gently cautioned. “It’s gonna be gettin’ dark soon.”
That’s what I was hoping, but I didn’t say that.
“Do you have any Advil?” I asked.
She motioned to the drawer, engrossed in shucking.
Stunned that she wouldn’t utilize the wheels on her chair and was actually making my tired body get up, I stood, not certain my fatigued legs would even hold me upright, at that point. I reached for the counter, and pulled myself along it over to the drawer. I found the bottle and took three pills — one for good measure. I left them out on the counter, having a sneaking suspicion that I was going to need the bottle again before the night was through.
I made the mistake of pouring me another glass of tea.
“Come on, Dahlin’!” she said in a “Chop! Chop!” tone. “There’s a couple of more rows to do.”
I wanted to cry “Uncle”, but I knew it would do no good. Still, I defended my action. “I can’t dry swallow the Advil, Nannie!”
“Well, hurry it up!” she firmly urged me to get back outside.
I’d never seen the “drill Sergeant” side of her before. She was tough. I chugged the tea and headed back outside. I’d catch my breath out there in the privacy of God’s wide, open spaces.
I sighed as I looked at those other two rows of corn I had to pick before it got dark — at least it was only two. There was a light at the end of the tunnel. My Aunt Myrtle — she was one, smart cookie! Yes. She sure was. I learned another big lesson that night: whenever it’s approaching nighttime and someone says the corn has not come in, and you know the contrary is true, keep your big trap shut!
Half-way through row five, I was wishing I had one of those sheet type things I’d seen in movies before that wrapped around field hands’ waists so they could just toss the produce on it and drag it along behind them.... I was wishing mighty hard I had one of those so that I could toss the ears of corn onto it and make one trip, dragging it all back up to the house with me. Man, that would have made my life SO much easier in that moment!
By row six, I felt like Sally Field in Places of the Heart, when her hands were all blistered, cut up and aching, her back felt like it was breaking and she was wearing knee pads, crawling down the row, because she was too bone-weary to stand on her own two feet any longer after picking all that godforsaken cotton! Yeah. I’d have given ANYTHING at that point for a set of knee pads, so that I could have crawled my way back to my grandmother’s house! It amazes me, after this horrific experience, that my heart did not harden against corn. I love it, but in that moment, I have never hated the sight of anything more in my life, and I wasn’t certain I ever wanted to see it again! [Thank God that moment passed... ;-) ]
The house. Salvation was waiting for me there: I could plop down. Take a load off. Have some iced-tea. Take a long, hot bath and hit the hay....or so I thought....
I knew when I walked into the house that I had grossly miscalculated the situation. There were two large vats on top of the stove. There was an empty pail with a knife sitting in my chair and one at my grandmother’s place.
I was afraid to ask, but had to.
“What’s going on?”
My grandmother looked at me and smiled as she informed. “We’ve got to get this corn put up.”
I looked at the clock. It was pushing nine o’clock.
“Put up?” I asked, not certain what this meant but knowing that I didn’t like the sound of it.
“We have to par-boil the ears,” she informed. “Then, we’ll freeze some of them on the cob, but cut most of it off and put it in freezer bags.”
I stared at her like a deer who was caught in the headlights. I looked around at the mountains of corn on the kitchen table, down all the counters, on the chairs and in pans on the floor. MOUNTAINS of it.
“That’s going to take us hours, Nannie!” I said in disbelief.
She nodded, chuckling. “It’s a good thing we got started when we did!”
My mouth fell open as I stared at it all. I wanted to cry. I couldn’t very well tell her that I didn’t want to do it. She was 85 years old. I couldn’t let her do it all by herself! I don’t know what I thought we were going to do with all that corn, but I didn’t think my Saturday night was going to be spent picking, shucking, boiling, cutting and bagging corn all evening. That was definitely not how I thought the night was going to go.
“I’m going to wash my face and hands,” I told her, heading to the bathroom and praying that the hot water would give me a second wind.
There were two things I thought as I sat down and began the process of cutting the corn off the cobs: 1) at least I was sitting down for this part of the chore; and, 2) Aunt Myrtle got the prize for being the brightest bulb in the pack that night!
By the time we finished and got the kitchen cleaned up and all the corn put up into my grandmother’s freezer, it was pushing one a.m.; to say I was beat was a gross understatement. At least, I thought, I could sleep in the next morning. That’s what I thought...
“Do you have anything for my hands?” I asked, showing my grandmother the blisters that had formed over the chafed, red patches of irritated skin.
She pulled out a small tub of udder cream. Yes. THAT kind of udder cream. Do not knock this until you try it, because it works. It soothes, and it softens the heat of the irritation. Gently, I rubbed it into my sore, burning hands.
“Do you need help getting to the bedroom?”
“No, Dahlin’,” she replied. “I’m going to do a few more things out here.”
God Bless her! I thought.
I bent down and kissed her goodnight, and headed for my bedroom.
“What time do you want me to get you up for church in the morning, Dahlin’?” she called to me softly.
I froze. I think I heard the Scooby Do, “Huh?” bellow out of me.
“Are you serious?” I thought.
“Ch-ch-church?” I said.
I should have known this had not been taken off the table. Unless she was in the hospital, my grandmother would never shortchange the Lord. Sunday was his day. It was a non-negotiable for her.
“We need to leave by 10:25 a.m.,” she reminded.
“I’ll get up at nine,” I told her.
“You don’t want any breakfast?” she asked.
“I’ll just have coffee,” I told her.
It was the first time in my life when sleep was more important to me than food. I would forgo breakfast in order to rest my weary body for a little while longer. I don’t even remember my head hitting the pillow that night.
I will say that I could hardly move for two days after that, and we still laugh over the “corn picking” experience I had with my grandmother. I don’t know how she did what she did. I truly don’t. I have said it before, and I will say it again, she was a better woman than I will ever be!
My grandmother was a card as she got older. She would crack us up! For those who knew her, she was a generous and gracious woman to those who visited her home. She would offer you food. She would make certain that you’d had enough food to eat. No one ever left her table hungry. There was an exception to that rule however in the latter years of her life. If my sister made her peanut butter pie or I made my cheesecake, my grandmother was not as inclined to share it as she otherwise was with anything else in her kitchen. Stingy is a word that comes to mind. Downright. She actually hid them in the back of her refrigerator, like we didn’t know we’d brought them down. It was funny. She’s the one who cut the desserts, so it was always comical when Nannie was doling out portions of either of these desserts to us. Sliver, in this case, would have been a generous portion.
My sister and I had gone down one weekend together, and Pam had made two peanut butter pies. One for us to eat and one to leave for Nannie. That didn’t matter to her that Pam had made an extra pie all for her. She was guarded even with the one we cut into. I don’t even know what you’d call the serving that my grandmother handed me? Tad — maybe.
“Good Lord!” I marveled. “You afraid we’re gonna taste it?” I asked, looking over the barely spoonful she’d put on my plate.
Pam walked in from the other room and saw my plate and looked at my grandmother. You could see the surprise on her face.
“Nannie!” she said, laughing in good-natured disbelief.
My grandmother got this funny little look on her face and hunched her shoulders up because we knew what she was doing, and we all began to laugh. She did not want to share even that one.
“There’s a whole other pie in there,” Pam told her.
“I know,” she replied, trying to minimize her uncharacteristic behavior. “I thought we’d have a little taste for now. We just ate supper. I’m still full from supper. Aren’t you both still full from supper?”
“Actually,” I said. “I saved a little room for dessert, Nannie, because Pam doesn’t make that pie very often.”
She nodded and replied politely. “Oh. Alright then.”
The tad became a thin sliver. We were grateful to have gotten it.
It was the same response when I made cheesecake: thin slivers were the most you got and hiding it in the back of the refrigerator was her standard practice.
It made us feel good though that our grandmother, who was in our opinion, the world’s BEST cook, would feel that way about something that each of us had made for her. It’s another thing that we still laugh about.
Likewise, I made a pie for Thanksgiving one year that my grandmother loved so much she asked me for the recipe for it. Not only that, she put it in her church’s cookbook. THAT was high praise and honor for me. She always made it at Christmas thereafter, and we lovingly referred to it as Nannie’s Christmas pie. It’s funny how little things like that can touch someone and come to mean something important. I never taste that pie now that I don’t think of my grandmother and the honor I felt when she requested that recipe from me, or when I learned that she had thought it was good enough to not only put her name on, but place it in something as important to her as her church cookbook.
The last time I spoke with her was Halloween night in 1999. It was a Sunday. I had called early because church was that night, but she wasn’t feeling well. She said that she didn’t think she’d be going out that night. I knew if she wasn’t going to church that she truly wasn’t feeling well, because Sunday, for her, was the Lord’s day. It belonged to him, and she never shortchanged him on her servitude and devotion.
“Well, you take care of yourself,” I told her.
“You too, Dahlin’!” she replied.
I told her that I’d call her in a couple of days and check on her. The last thing I ever said to her and heard in return was “I love you.” It is a gift when those are the last words that you carry from a loved one and know that they take with them from you. At this point in my life, they are the last words I ever say to a loved one when I get off the phone or leave an event. I want that to always be the last thing I’ve ever said to anyone I care about — because you never know...
That Tuesday morning, November the 2nd, I was getting ready for work and listening to Eva Cassidy, when the phone rang. I always get an uncomfortable feeling when the phone rings late at night or early in the morning. It’s normally not good news. It wasn’t.
It was my father calling to tell me that my grandmother had passed in the early hours of the morning. My mother was already in route down to Virginia. Even when you know that someone’s time is close at hand, and your loved one has been having health problems for a while, it’s never easy getting that phone call. You’re never prepared for it no matter how much you try to prepare yourself for it.
I could tell my father was shaken by the news. My grandmother had been a mother figure to him since he was a teenager, and he held her in the highest esteem. The very fact that he wasn’t going into work that day – a man who had only missed a half-day’s work in more than 35 years told me just how devastated HE was by the news of her loss.
“Why don’t I come over in a little while?” I suggested. “I’ll make us some lunch.”
“That’ll be fine,” he said sadly.
“How’s Mother?” I asked, sniffing, and wiping my eyes, not thrilled to know she was on the road driving in an upset state.
“As well as can be expected,” he replied. “She said she’ll call you later.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see you in bit.”
When I hung up, I started crying again as Eva Cassidy finished singing “Oh, Had I A Golden Thread”. It was odd THAT song was playing as I got the news that my grandmother had passed. She was the golden thread in our family — the one that was woven throughout all of us. She was the great maternal, anchoring force that bound us together. She was golden alright — pure gold. It wasn’t lost on me.
Later that day, I did go over to my parents house. I remember walking around outside in their backyard — the wooded part of the yard, gathering my thoughts because I wanted to give the eulogy at my grandmother’s service. I wasn’t certain if I could do it, but I wanted to try. I thought a lot about her that day. She had told us not to cry for her when she finally went, because she was ready to go.
She was 89 years old and had lived a good and full life. That’s what she’d told us. She loved us, and she would miss us, but she was ready to go home when God called her. She had actually said that to all of us at different times during the previous year. I think she knew that her time here was coming to an end. It was a comfort to hear that from her, but that was my grandmother.
I wanted to say something comforting to her one final time to send her off with the most loving thoughts from my heart, and let her know what she had meant to me — what she would always mean to me.
I remembered something she had read to me when I was little girl, and she had come to visit us for Thanksgiving. I was sitting on my bed trying to read a book that was too big for me, at the time, but I’d liked the pictures in it when I’d seen it in the library, so I checked it out. She heard me struggling with it and came into my bedroom to help me read it. She pulled me close to her and wrapped her arm around me then proceeded to read me the most glorious — magical part of The Velveteen Rabbit. Years later, when I got married, I used those lines in my wedding vows to my husband. My grandmother smiled when I told her that, because she couldn’t be at my wedding, but when I told her about my vows and asked her if she remembered reading that story to me as a child, she smiled and said she remembered it vividly. It had meant a lot to her to know that a special moment that she and I had shared, had been used in the life-long vow that I had given to my husband on my wedding day.
I thought about those words again today as I listened to Eva Cassidy sing Oh, Had I A Golden Thread and Fields of Gold. I remembered standing before her casket on that chilly, November day 14 years ago and saying “so long for now”, to her in the most loving way I knew how to say it:
"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side... “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or does it happen bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But, these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.
"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always..."
I remember her today with all the love and gratitude my heart can hold for the gift that she was to me — for the lessons she taught— for her sterling example. We made her real. My mother, aunt, brother, sister, cousins and I. Our love for her lasts for always...
Oh, I have a golden thread running through me. It bears her name: Martha...
I’ll see her again one day in Heaven. She’s waiting there for us. She’ll be whole and restored, once again, just like the Bible says she’ll be. Her legs will be intact. And, I’ll take hold of her arm, as we catch up with one another over all the years we’ve missed, and we’ll walk in fields of gold...
http://youtu.be/hKtqTYSOBCg Fields of Gold~Eva Cassidy
Nannie’s Christmas Pie
INGREDIENTS:
1 (9 inch) un-baked pie shell
2 eggs, beaten
1/3 cup butter, melted
1 cup white sugar [You can cut this to 3/4 c of sugar if you’d like it a little less sweet]
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon distilled white vinegar
1/2 cup chopped pecans
½ cup shredded coconut
½ cup golden raisins
DIRECTIONS:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
In a medium mixing bowl combine eggs, butter, sugar, vanilla extract, and vinegar. Beat until smooth. Stir in pecans, coconut, and raisins. Pour mixture into pastry shell.
Bake in preheated oven for 40 minutes. Cool before serving.
*Serve with vanilla ice-cream or whipped cream.
** For a little twist, add a ½ cup of milk chocolate chips
