a serving window and ended up as a large country restaurant, with upstairs and downstairs dining rooms and what she called “a nightclub” up back. People also grew when she touched them. Recently, I was reunited with a man I remembered from my childhood as a local high school basketball player. He confided to me that my grandmother had helped him get an athletic scholarship to the University of Kentucky, and that this education had given him a wonderful life he would not otherwise have had. This is only one of many stories I’ve heard about people she helped along the way, but it was the people themselves who did the telling. Whatever she did for others, she kept to herself.

She was larger than life, yet so comfortable inside her own skin that all who met her,