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two years before transferring to the University of Georgia. In Meemaw’s neighborhood, the houses are older and more run-down and there are a lot of colored families living there. Daddy says the neighborhood was nicer when he was growing up, but times they are a-changing! He just hopes his mama doesn’t lose all the money in her house as the whites move out and the Negroes move in. But Meemaw says there is no way she is moving. No sir. She raised her babies and buried a husband while living in that house and she isn’t about to move away from her memories just because some of her white neighbors aren’t able to see that we are all precious children of God.
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    I bring my bike, freshly christened with the JLMTIK license tag, to my spend-the-night at Meemaw’s. She is waiting on the front porch swing, dressed in a pair of pink shorts and the T-shirt I gave her last year for her birthday, which says: “World’s Best Grandma.” Her legs are crisscrossed with purple and blue veins.
    “You planning on riding away from me?” she asks as I walk my bike up to the house.
    “I wanted to show you the license tag I made.”
    She makes her way down the front porch steps to get close enough to examine it. “Well, if that ain’t the prettiest thing! What’s it mean, though, I wonder?”
    I have a feeling she knows, but I answer anyway. “Jesus Loves Me This I Know.”
    “For the Bible tells me so! That’s wonderful, precious. I just love it. And I love the way it glitters! Weren’t you smart to make it all shiny like that so people would take notice. Now why don’t you leaveyour bike on the porch for now and you can come in and meet my new kitty. And later I’ve got a chocolate cake for us to decorate. I’d already fixed a pound cake, but then I got this fierce hankering for a slice of chocolate cake with milk.”
    Meemaw always ices her chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting. It’s my favorite kind because Meemaw and me can dye it whatever color we want. I like pink, but I can only color it that way if it’s just Meemaw and me eating it. One time I brought home a batch of pink cupcakes for my family. Hunter asked, “Why’d you choose that sissy color?” Daddy said he bet I’d tried to make them red for the Georgia Bulldogs but just hadn’t added enough food coloring. “Isn’t that right, son?” Daddy asked, and I answered, “Yes, sir,” knowing that was what he wanted to hear.
    Meemaw’s house is a lot smaller than ours. You walk right into the living room, where there is an old-fashioned fireplace where we sometimes roast marshmallows for s’mores during the winter. You can’t even see the wall over the mantel, it is so covered in pictures of family, including every school picture Troy, Hunter, and me have ever taken and a picture of Meemaw’s husband, Daddy Banks, in uniform. He died a hero, but Daddy always said Meemaw was a hero, too, the way she raised him and his sister, June, all by herself. Meemaw always corrects Daddy when he says that. She says she didn’t do it all by herself, she did it with the help of her church family at Second Avenue Baptist, where Meemaw still goes. Meemaw told Daddy she was mighty proud of him for being senior preacher at Clairmont, but she’d been going to Second Avenue for forty-something years and quitting them now would be like quitting her beloved husband. Daddy pretends to understand, but I know it hurts him that his own mama isn’t a member at our church.
    I ask Meemaw where that new kitten is and she says probably hiding under the bed somewhere. So we tiptoe into Meemaw’s room and peek beneath the bed skirt. I see a shiny set of yellow eyes but can’t really make out the cat’s body. It’s awfully dark under there, andMeemaw says Moses is jet-black. I reach out my hand to see if he will come to it, but he backs away.
    “He’s shy,” says Meemaw. “He’ll probably come out later if we just leave him be.”
    “Maybe we should frost