My dad’s mother was a unique woman. To describe her as ornery would short-change her thrifty little soul. She was more than that, she was a multi-faceted personality that defied simple adjectives. We called her Maw Maw.

Her real name was Nellie and she grew up as a poor country girl in the Piedmont of North Carolina. She and my Paw Paw had two boys and four girls, each of them separated by two years. My Dad was the baby and he didn’t have an easy life. He wasn’t raised on a real farm but the family depended on milk from their cows and eggs from their chickens and vegetables from their garden. Canning their bounty for the winter months wasn’t an option, it was a necessity.

Growing up, I never saw my Maw Maw as a person. She was my Maw Maw, an adult fixture with grandmother status. But as I got older and began paying attention, I realized how much of a character she was. She was probably the most impatient person I’ve ever met. If she was ready to go, she was ready to go. Right then. And if you didn’t start the car at that very moment, she took off walking without you. I’m not exaggerating, she did this all the time.

Maw Maw was always very frugal, living in a small singlewide from my earliest memories. She was one of the first to collect cans back when the recycling movement began. Two liter Pepsis disappeared from our holiday meals to be replaced with aluminum cans, just so she could get money for recycling them afterwards. I remember opening her fridge one year and just staring at its contents. Like a commercial, there was no food, it was crammed from top to bottom with soda cans.

The family allowed Maw Maw to have her harmless eccentricities. Even when my aunt caught her opening new cans and pouring them out in the sink, just so she could recycle them, we called it quirky and laughed about it. It was another story to recall at family get-togethers.

For Christmas, Maw Maw didn’t want gifts. She didn’t care if you spent hours shopping for the perfect sweater. She wanted money and if you asked her, that’s exactly what she would say. But my Dad had a great idea one year, he took her three large garbage bags full of crushed cans and you should’ve seen how her face lit up. He’d done something no one else could, he’d finally found something she wanted more than money.

Maw Maw used to go on can-gathering excursions, stopping by the side of the road whenever she saw metal gleaming in the ditch. She loved her recycling, it was a part of her personality. Then one time my aunt received a phone call late at night from an old black man in Siler City, more than sixty miles away. He’d found my Maw Maw wandering down a deserted dirt road in the moonlight, clutching a bag of freshly scavenged cans, lost and disoriented. She couldn’t remember where she was or where she’d left her car. All she remembered was her name and mission.

After that incident, something had to be done. The family couldn’t break her heart by taking her driver’s license away, but that week the carburetor mysteriously disappeared from her Dodge. She was told that the car was broken and a part was ordered. Maw Maw’s dementia had set in so bad that each week she accepted that the part was still on order. It never arrived.

She may have been losing her mind but her orneriness was very much intact. Several weeks later, she was found strolling down another country road, cans in hand, with a singular thought in mind. You could say anything about that woman you wanted, but you couldn’t ignore her persistence. And somewhere along the way, I realized that my Maw Maw had become the crazy old can lady people talked about.

The family finally had a meeting and decided that at ninety years of age, our Maw Maw couldn’t live by herself any more. She would have to go in a home because no one could sufficiently look after her in her condition. She was too far gone.

Before I was born, my Maw Maw and Paw Paw offered up a deal to their children. Everything they owned, over forty-two acres of land and an old farmhouse, would be willed to whomever agreed to take care of them in their old age. The eldest son took the responsibility but like Paw Paw, he died in his early sixties of a heart attack. By the time my Maw Maw had gotten to the point of needing supervision, the duty had fallen to my uncle’s oldest son, Chuck, the black sheep of the family.

It was the Christmas before my Maw Maw was admitted to the nursing home that one of my favorite cousins, Sharon, pulled me aside. She herded me into the back room where my sister was flipping through old photo albums and handed me a shoebox full of tattered photographs, telling me to pick out any of them I wanted.

“These are Maw Maw’s,” I said.

“Yeah, you want any of them?” Sharon replied.

“She’s giving them to us?”

“No,” Sharon said, looking through a box of her own. “She don’t know we’re in here.”

“But, we can’t steal her pictures,” I replied.

Sharon stopped shuffling through the photos and looked up at me seriously. “She won’t notice.”

I was aghast, this was a foreign concept to me. Stealing pictures from my Maw Maw? It was unheard of. You didn’t do things like that in the South. Noticing my reluctance, Sharon explained, “She ain’t got long. You know it and I know it. And what do you think’s gonna happen to these pictures when she’s gone? You think we’ll ever see them again?”

I thought about that and about Chuck and realized she was right. These boxes and photo albums were full of Maw Maw’s memories and pretty soon, that would be all we had of her. If we were to preserve them, then we had no choice but to steal them now, before the evil cousin kept them forever. Or worse, destroyed them out of spite.

I found all sorts of treasures that day. Off-color pictures from my childhood with a smiling blond-headed kid without a care to his name. Photos that captured enjoyable times but weren’t part of my collective consciousness. Moments frozen in yellowed cellulose, filled with unheard laughter and vivid happiness, attempts to capture timeless memories forever. Long wavy hair, butterfly collars, bellbottoms, humongous gas-guzzling cars. Grainy, faded and slightly out-of-focus.

They were the photos of my extended family, of times I would never know of except in stories. Some of the relatives were dead, like my cousin Randy who’d drowned in the pond down the road. I wasn’t old enough to remember when it happened but here he was in a picture, a sprite good-looking seventeen year old, preserved alongside a photo of me in diapers, holding my arms out and giggling at something happening off-camera.

Pictures of my mom and dad when they were newly married, young and fresh and looking forward to a life of marital bliss. Candid shots of holidays and birthdays and people I barely knew with bushy sideburns and curly hair. Black-and-white photos of serious-looking children from a time when it wasn’t an accepted practice to smile for the camera, as if the smile would be forever stolen. Photos of my dad at all ages, making the same devilish scrunched-up faces my one year old nephew makes. Now I know where he gets those expressions from.

I was sad that day stealing my Maw Maw’s pictures while she sat unknowingly in the next room, hawking her kin, waiting for them to finish their Pepsis so she could spirit away their cans like a squirrel hoarding nuts for the winter. But I kept telling myself it was necessary, it was for the best, that in order to preserve the photos, we had to take them.

So my cousins and my sister and I did the unthinkable. We each stuffed Maw Maw’s pictures under our shirts and smuggled them out to our cars. We didn’t even have the decency to wait until she died two years later. But every time I pull out that picture of my dad as a teenager, sporting a fifties flattop and holding an Orange Nehi in one hand, I remember my Maw Maw and all that she meant to me. And I don’t feel the least bit guilty about stealing her pictures. In fact, I think that if she had been aware at the time, she would’ve begged me to take a few more.