My grandmother is the original badass. I can’t even imagine holding a candle to her or the unapologetic, full throttle life she’s led.

I don’t remember the first meeting with my grandmother, Miss Adele, when I was still in swaddling clothes. She told me some years later, that she knew that I needed to be taken care of . She said, “chile’, I knew you were comin’ before your mamma knew you were comin.” She drove to Boston to get me and brought me back to DC for an extended visit. My young and very inexperienced mother needed some time to gather herself.

But our next meeting is indelible. I was seven years old. “Function at the Junction” was jumpin’ off the hi-fi and the smells coming from the kitchen were like no others I’d ever smelled before—collard greens cooked in fatback and chittlins—I learned later.

It was a sunny June day that I arrived in DC and walked into the very different world that was my grandmother’s house and into her bosom.

There they were . . .

No one before or since has aroused the warmth and love of my grandmother’s elegant and inviting bosom.

On that June day they were as they would continue to be for many years to come, propped up and on display.

She threw open her arms “come here chile’” and I ran straight into the very essence of warm and soft. She pulled me up off the floor. As she swayed back and forth with me in her arms, I heard moaning “hmmmmmmmumh” as if she tasted something unbelievably delicious.

To this day I remember the scent of Émeraude that stayed on my face and clothes all that day.

I was hooked . . .

My grandmother was the complete package, before there was such a thing as a “complete package.” She was the prettiest thing I had ever seen. Her face was the color of the crust of one of her perfect pound cakes just of out the oven.

And I discovered later in life that the slightly darker freckles scattered about under her eyes were the outward signs of a secret liaison between her mother and an Irish country doctor down in Farmville, North Carolina, from where she had escaped years earlier.

She kept company with the neighborhood number runners, petty and major crooks, corner stores cronies and grifters.

They all sat around her table to enjoy the sight, play cards or drink her homemade hooch. But the cards and the licqua--came at price. She was the first woman I knew to hold her own in a room full of men. If hostilities did erupt, a loud and firm, “put that goddamn knife down” from Ms. Adele was always sufficient to quell the anger. The fear of not being welcome in her house won out over male ego.

Around her card table she managed to keep the peace of an ever changing rogue’s gallery.

And there were the regulars and family friends too.

There was Black—that’s it just Black. He was the color of a piece of charcoal and had a scar that extended from the corner of his left eye and disappeared under his chin. There was Harry Sheffy. Who was a massive 400 pound hunk a burnin’ love who had a wife who lived off Lincoln Park and Miss Adele for a girlfriend. It was rumored that he dealt in stolen—er, I mean lost property. As her grandchildren got older and more sassy we started to question how, Miss Adele and Mr. Sheffy “did it.”

On Friday or Saturday nights I learned to make a nuisance of myself around the adult’s card table. “What y’all children want? Go outside and play,” Miss Adele pleaded. It was time to go if Black had to look up from his cards. Wanting to get rid of the persistent little gnats that we were, Black’s slow, low growl was a warning, “here take this money and go get some ice cream.” On the other hand, Sheffy would pretend to drop money on the floor, of course he couldn’t pick it up and ask whichever child got to it first to hold on to it for him. He never asked for it back

My grandmother was the antithesis of my not just small, but miniscule-chested, tightly-buttoned-down-harsh-disciplinarian of a mother.

I would frequently ask, to the embarrassment of my mother, if I could stay or spend the night at my grandmother’s. Not being a stupid child, I would ask while standing behind my grandmother’s skirt. “Aw, let the child stay.” She would say to my mother. “You ain’t doin’ nothin’ but goin’ home to look at the walls.” It was maternal warfare that my grandmother won from the get go.

All the while Adele’s great bosom was welcoming people and families looking to make a better life in the big city. She always had a room, a cot or space on the floor for anybody who was in need, especially if they were from “home.”

It was Miss Adele that taught me to drive and not fear anything with an engine.

I watched intently as she would fineness her 1965 black Mercury Monterey through traffic with never a moment of doubt. A few years ago I fulfilled a dream and took a class to learn to ride a motorcycle—continuing the badass legacy. You can believe that Miss Adele was there in spirit. She also taught me to change a flat tire when I was ten years old and bake sweet potato pie from scratch “come here chile’ and watch while I do this” she’d say; I’ve forgotten none of it.

Miss Adele is 94. She has survived two strokes, and lost her left breast to cancer. I visited her shortly after her mastectomy. I asked her if I could touch her scar. Her salty response was “you might as well, chile’cause ain’t nobody else interested.” Perpetually horny . . . I should be so lucky!

It came as no surprise to me when I got my own suspicious results from an annual mammogram. Miss Adele walked with me constantly for the scariest two months of my life--waiting for test results. This was the gene pool that I sprang up from. I really did take after her . . .  and I asked often

WWMAD—what would Miss Adele Do?

I dodged a bullet then when my follow up mammogram and biopsy came back negative. It was then that I realized that I wasn’t doing the first love of my life justice. So I started living—out loud—the way I had watched Miss Adele live in her heyday and even at 94. So, when I got up off the table to look at my first of three tattoos in 1 month, the first emblazoned on my stomach, she was there.

I had her support when I kicked an unappreciative husband to the curb “you more you with him or without him?” she had asked.

This summer when you hear a pair of screamin’ Harley pipes comin’ your way make sure you’re on the curb but lookin’ our way. You don’t want to miss the hip hugger on the back seat. It just might be the original badass!