“She was a tough lady in a time when women weren’t expected to be,” my father said to me regarding his grandmother and my great-grandmother, Mary Maude Jago Hayes, during and after the Great Depression. “She loved her sherry, she loved her children and god forbid anyone who got in the way of either one of her two loves.” My father continued his tale by telling me, “my father told me all these stories about her. I never met her, but I knew her through my father and through the stories that he told me.”
