My mom was a little girl during the Great Depression. In addition to all that, she grew up in a tiny town in the Mississippi Delta.

If the rest of the country was broke, the Delta was like Oh my God, how could they get any poorer poor.

They lived on what they could grow on their farm and had precious little extra.

One of my mom's best pal's was a big black cat named Kitty Kay-O. Back in those days cats weren't that common in those parts. Kay-o was a prized mouser and her kittens were big, good natured cats. Everyone wanted one of her kittens to keep the mice and rats out of their barns.

One of their neighbors asked my grandmother if she could have one of Kay-O's latest litter.

My grandmother, everyone called her Joie (pronounced Joey- for Johanna), told her neighbor, "We need to wait until they are big enough to eat." She left off a key clause: on their own.

If you know kittens, they aren't ready to leave their mama cats until they can eat on their own- usually 6-8 weeks.

If you don't know cats, and that clause is missing, you could draw some rather awkward conclusions.

Some time later Joie was mortified to learn that the talk of the town was that cats were on her menu!

Joie was an extraordinary woman. So Gallic, she would have fit right in on a Parisian Avenue right down to her shrug. She was short, dark and with a command presence that any Admiral or General could envy. She was born in the late 1880s and passed away in 1984. She was the glue and bone that kept the family together and thriving regardless of poverty, disease, tragedy and triumph. She was Cajun- and knew her family history all the way back to her ancestor that came to New Orleans as a Casquett girl.

In her living memory she heard the old ones tell about the day that half the family died at Shiloh in a place called the Hornet's Nest. She remembered Yellow Fever wiping out whole villages. She saw the World Wars and the Moon Landings. I interviewed her many times as a living witness to the history I was learning in school.

What we grandchildren only discovered years after her passing, she told us all: you are my favorite- don't tell the others.

It worked. She made us all feel pretty special.