My grandmother Phyllis Blackhurst was born on July 3, 1933 in Marion, Virginia to Marvin Denton and Nellie May Cormany, and was less than a half hour short of being born on Independence Day. Her hometown was in the middle of an abnormal cold snap, so her father had to go out to well with an ice pick to get water for the birth because it was frozen over. The Great Depression had hit the region particularly hard, so Phyllis learned how to make her own dresses out of flour sacks. She and her siblings began helping their parents out on the farm at an early age.

Grandma B was smart from day one; an honor roll regular in elementary and middle school, and a member of the Marion High School chapter of the National Honor Society. During her high school years, she went on occasional trips to Belle, West Virginia to see her uncle and aunt Roscoe and Bessie Cormany, and sing in church with Bessie on Sundays. Phyllis sang contralto, and Bessie sang soprano, and Phyllis would often show up in her best red dress. It was on one of these Sundays that a strapping young engineer named Donald Lee "Don" Blackhurst noticed the "red bird" singing on stage, and once they got to chat after the service, it was love at first sight. They dated for a few years before saying "I do" on October 5, 1952 in Centenary Methodist Church in Marion. God blessed them with three girls and one boy, Mom and her twin brother being the last two, and they were happily married for nearly thirty years.

Even if the family wasn't always in the same place for more than a few years because of Don's job with Bell Telephone, Phyllis made sure to treat her family and friends with the same love and support every day, and always found a secretary job in each city where they lived. Nobody got too skinny in her household because Grandma's down-home Southern cooking "fattened them up." As her children grew taller than her and Grandpa, she would tease them by saying "we start feeding you shortenin' bread," and she said the same for me and her six other grandkids.

Sadly, Grandpa B passed away from colon cancer in April of 1982, five years before his first grandchild was born, and a month before Mom and my uncle graduated high school. Grandma had to put the twins through Rutgers on her own, but she persevered. She happily worked as secretary for several deans at the university until her well-deserved retirement in 1997, when my parents picked her up from work for a nice party, with me and my stroller in tow.

Grandma B had seven grandchildren, and boy, did she spoil us rotten! When my brother and I were little, she still lived up in New Jersey close to my cousins, where they saw each other frequently, and we would fly up a few times a year to see her. She moved down to Indialantic, Florida just before I started the fifth grade, and her house, "the Chalet," became our family's default reunion destination. She followed the same protocol with us as she did with her children, never letting us get too skinny, and each new day at our big family reunions would start with us waking up to the irresistible aroma of eggs, freshly brewed coffee, and bacon, sausage, butterflied hot dogs, or ham steaks. In addition to her delectable breakfasts, Grandma B was also notorious for her rolls, Salisbury steak, spaghetti and meat sauce, cornbread, macaroni and cheese, collard greens, turnip greens, and many more. Her countless witticisms and malapropisms often left us laughing so hard that we ended up in crying and coughing fits.

In 2010, Grandma B was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease after getting lost on the way to lunch with Mom at Cracker Barrel, and we moved her between three nursing homes as her condition worsened. Even as she became less physically active, and stumbled over our names, she was always happy to see us, and still bragged about us to her friends at the nursing home. She passed away peacefully on October 9, 2014 surrounded by her loving family, and her legacy lives on in all of us.