The little girls who walked to Winston-Salem to peddle wild berries certainly never dreamed of traveling so far so quickly. Yet their generation survived the depression, multiple wars, politicians, and even television.
The changes that my mother and her sisters faced are hard to even measure. My mother drove a horse drawn buggy, went to a one room school, learned how to drive a Model T, and went off and became a successful business person. She was a regular visitor to our family when we lived in Atlantic Canada. Somehow she always managed to find her way through Logan Airport in Boston. I can still remember her flying once to Halifax, NS, just for the weekend. Often she was accompanied on her many trips by her beloved sister Mollie Brown.
Last week we had our first frost. That day we buried my Aunt Mollie. Seven months earlier on a cold Monday in late March, we buried, my mother, Blanche, her sister. My mother was one of seven children. She, my Aunt Mollie, and the only surviving sister, my Aunt Sally, grew up on a mill pond, Styers Mill Pond in Yadkin Country, NC.
In the space of a growing season, one generation is now starting to recede into the fog of time. While all three of them were still alive, the past was like an oak with each sister a root grounding it in the present.
My wife, Glenda, my children and I were extremely fortunate that my mother, who died at the age of ninety three and almost seven months, retained her sharp mind and tongue almost until the end. Through my mother’s many stories were able to relive the past, those days when she picked wild strawberries for twenty-five cents a gallon or when they cut blocks of ice out of their mill pond and stored it for making ice cream or enjoying a cold glass of lemonade the next summer. It is hard to image the Styers girls going to Winston-Salem by horse and buggy, even crossing the Yadkin River on their grandpa Styers’ ferry.
How often we heard the story of my Aunt Molly's elopment to Hillsville with her beloved Austin, and how they had to drive home by moonlight. She used to love to tell how she and Sally threw Mollie out of bed, saying they were not going to sleep with an old married woman. True to her character Mollie used to say that it did not bother her, and she climbed right back in bed with them. I am thankful for the invention of the video camera as I have at least three versions of the story on film to pass down to my children.
Having just traveled the four lanes of Highway 421 to Yadkinville, it is hard to comprehend this much change in a lifetime.
Change has brought better medical care, yet my Aunt Mollie suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for nine years and my mother died of cancer. Their mother died in the great flu epidemic early in the last century leaving my mother at the age of nine as the cook of the house. Yet her grandmother lived to be over one hundred years old. I can still remember being sent to peek in her window, just to make certain she was okay. She spent her last days, sitting by a wood stove in a small one room house in Lewisville.
The changes that my mother and her sisters faced are hard to even measure. My mother drove a horse drawn buggy, went to a one room school, learned how to drive a Model T, and went off and became a successful business person. She was a regular visitor to our family when we lived in Atlantic Canada. Somehow she always managed to find her way through Logan Airport in Boston. I can still remember her flying once to Halifax, NS, just for the weekend. Often she was accompanied on her many trips by her beloved sister Molly Brown.
The little girl who walked to Winston-Salem to peddle wild berries certainly never dreamed of traveling so far so quickly. Yet her generation survived the depression, multiple wars, politicians, and even television.
They seemed to have the ability to keep going no matter what the challenge. As I rummage through the gas rationing coupons we found while cleaning out the magical house at 347 West Pine Street in Mount Airy, where she spent so many years, I cannot help but wonder how she would view the first growing season that she missed.
She would be glad the Red Sox finally won. The television brought her baseball and as we learned last year, talking to her when baseball was on was as difficult as talking to the most dedicated NFL fan on Sunday afternoon. She would have enjoyed the great tomato season this year, and would have been pleased that one last crop grew in her backyard. As a life-long Democrat, she would still be raving at the election results, and looking forward to the next time she could vote her beliefs. She would be frustrated with the war and death in Iraq. She would be pleased that her sister Mollie no longer had to suffer. She would be worried about her sister Sally, and hoping that she was as comfortable as possible. She would be asking about her grandchildren and worried about them working too hard at their jobs. Yet above all she would be ready for winter and the chance to read, think, and prepare for yet another growing season and whatever it brought. In that is a lesson for us all.
In fact winter was one of her favorite times. It was a time to bed down the garden and stop pulling weeds for a while. Winter was a time for family get togethers. I can remember those wonderful Christmas parties at my Aunt Mollie’s, not to mention Thanksgiving meals with huge platters of dressing, all the Sunday afternoon ice cream-watermelon parties and those unbelievable chicken stews. There's something magical about chicken stew cooked in Yadkin Country. I am pretty sure the special ingredient is love for family and friends. As I look forward to a chicken stew perhaps even before the next growing season, I know there will never be another Aunt Mollie, whom I am sure never saw a child without feeling pure love in her heart. Though Aunt Mollie is gone, she will live on in spirit through her wonderful family and all those she touched, including me, my wife, and my children. She will never be forgotten and will always be loved.
My mother and her sister Mollie were very different, but neither one could have been what they were were without their family. My life would be far different if I and my small family had not be under the umbrella of family love that seemed to be there whenever it was needed from the extended family that started on the banks of the mill pond. Maybe there was something special in the water in that mill pond that kept family ties strong not matter what the difficulty.
As the seasons turn to slip by rapidly, it is a comfort that families stretch across the centuries, changing, adapting and providing the glue that holds us all together.
After the funeral as I walked down the overwhelming table of food provided for my Aunt Mollie’s family by the good ladies of the Union Cross Community, I could not help but think of the nearness of the Styers Mill Pond site, the water long replaced by trees, but never forgotten. Though I never saw the pond, it will always be there in my mind with three little girls playing on its banks being watched over from above by those ladies who bridged two centuries, raised wonderful families, and taught me that change is inevitable and life is what you make out of it.