High Fidelity

On Sundays when my great-grandmother could no longer make it to church, she cranked up Tennessee Ernie Ford's All-Time Greatest Hymns. And it wasn't because she was hard of hearing

- By JENNIE IVEY, Cookeville, Tennessee

I rifled through the beat-up cardboard box filled with music CDs, looking for something to play on an upcoming car trip. At the bottom, beneath the classic country and classic rock, I found an album I hadn't come across in years: Tennessee Ernie Ford's All-Time Greatest Hymns.

My mind hearkened back more than a half century to the cozy suburban house in Augusta, Georgia, where I'd grown up. My family shared our home with my maternal great-grandmother, Jennie Matthews, my namesake. Grandma was well into her eighties when she came to live with us. I was nine. Though she considered herself spry, in truth it was often hard for her to get around. Her feet were so arthritic, it was sometimes difficult for her even to stand.

That didn't matter to either of us because there were plenty of fun things we could do sitting down. I read to her, and she read to me. We played Yahtzee. We played Scrabble. We played cards. We grew a big messy flower bed—I planted and weeded and watered while Grandma supervised from a lawn chair—so we could have beautiful bouquets for the dining table. We watched baseball on the tiny black-and-white portable TV in her room, which inspired my lifelong love of the game. We ate lunch together whenever I wasn't in school—a bologna-and-cheese sandwich for me and day-old corn bread crumbled into a glass of cold buttermilk for her.

But my favorite thing to do with Grandma was something we called Church at Home.