Mom grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Her family had land that they farmed. Each child had their own jobs and responsibilities. Mom loves to remember special trips to town with her daddy on Saturday to get supplies for the week. She has lots of very clear memories from those years.
Mom was child number 5 of 6 kids. Graham was the oldest and went to work for American Airlines in Dallas, TX, so I never knew him very well. Aunt Daught, short for “daughter” whose real name was Ethel, was next then Uncle Bean, a nickname for Prior. Aunt Ollie Lee was next, then Mom, and Aunt Francis. Grandmama raised a grandson, Alexander, who I always thought of as an uncle too. Mom’s daddy died when she was only 16 so I never knew him. Daught never married and lived with Grandmama. Uncle Bean married Aunt Esther and they lived just down the road and had an amazing muscadine vine in their woods. Ollie Lee lived close by, but I have only shadowy memories of her. I don’t remember Francis at all.
My earliest memories of Grandmama include snuggles with her in a feather bed. Since I was the littlest grandchild, I slept with her. She was soft and warm. She had lots of quilts on the bed. When she would get up to start the fire in the kitchen stove to make coffee and biscuits, the weight of the quilts would snuggle me deep into the mattress and I hardly had the strength to escape their embrace.
My daddy called Grandmama “Miss Annie.” He has sweet memories of her, too. She was tough-on-the-inside, sweet-on-the-outside. She had a precious laugh and a gentle but firm hand. By the time I came along, the only farm animals left were the chickens. She’d send me out with their feed bucket in my nightgown and her work boots. I was mostly scared of them, especially the rooster, but I loved pulling their still warm eggs out and bringing them back for breakfast. She would fuss over me as if I had produced the eggs myself!
When we lived in Cary, NC, we were close enough to visit often. I was a preschooler then and wanted to do everything my older siblings and cousins were doing. I remember the sense of longing I had to jump out of the hay barn on the rope swing. Of course, Grandmama wouldn’t let me. But she did teach me to snap beans on the stairs of the stoop into an old milk bucket. Someone had put two boards as shelves between two trees and the trees had grown bark to envelop the ends of the boards. She taught me how to climb up and I would sit there and read or daydream. She had a tiny square flower garden that she and I would tend and I remember the feeling of the sand and the smell of geraniums.
They didn’t have indoor plumbing so I also remember the outhouse and the outdoor shower. Both were scary things for a kid used to being warm for those activities. Sometime late in Grandmama’s life, she moved in with my Aunt Daught to a small house next door with a bathroom. I think she missed being outside, but I didn’t!
We moved to Cocoa Beach, Florida, and Duluth, Minnesota, before settling in Clarkesville in 1977. We were too far away to visit regularly. Grandmama came here a couple of times before her death in 1988. One of my favorite pictures is of her with Mom in the front yard. Mom had more pepper than salt in her hair then, but Grandmama’s hair was pure white. Beautiful silver. My sister, Carla, is there, too, and she is holding her daughter, Megan. Four generations.
A couple of months ago, Alexander and his wife, Vera, brought Aunt Daught to visit Mom. The sisters are the only two left from their family of origin. It was a sweet reunion. Although they stayed only a couple of hours, it was sweet to see the two siblings together. I’m not sure they recognized each other, but their spirits remembered.
It made me think about the connections that are made when people are born to the time when they are in their later years. Some people believe these relationships can be severed, but I don’t think so. Not really. They are connected to our memories and to our sense of self. Mom spends a lot of time reliving these early years. She looks at her grown children and sometimes mistakenly refers to us as a friend or a teacher from her childhood. She remembers teachers and Sunday School leaders from 70 years ago as if she had just left them last week.
Memories are a wonderful gift.
