As I looked around, I saw that the alumni were all accompanied by members of their families who elected to stand to the side and watch the touching reunions between classmates. Some of the classmates, I learned later, had not seen each other in the sixty years since they’d graduated. The scene was made more poignant to me by the certain knowledge that few in this aged group would have another opportunity to see each other again after this reunion.
As I was helping Mother from the car, we heard an enthusiastic shout of “Lenora!” I looked up to see a tall slim woman striding toward us.
“Nancy!” Mother called out and the two were soon hugging and telling each other how wonderful they looked.
Several mobilely challenged elderly women, leaning on a variety of walking sticks for support, descended on us at once, calling out: “Lenora!” “There’s Lenora!” They smothered my mother in hugs and acknowledged her introductions of me with a nod and a pat on the arm. The gaggle of voices overlapped as they began to catch up with each other.
Myrtle, a rouged and powdered, blue-haired classmate to whom I’d just been introduced, took me aside for a play by play of the crowd that had gathered around my mother.
“That’s Nancy,” she said, pointing. “She was our star basketball player. She went on to the University of Georgia, but I don’t think she played basketball there. She’s a scratch golfer. Beats all the men she plays with. ‘Course, they’re a bunch of pansies. Every little ache and pain stops them cold. Those of us who’ve had babies aren’t bothered by the little aches and pains, are we, dear? You do have children, don’t you, honey?” She searched my eyes for confirmation she hadn’t just made a faux pas.
“Yes, ma’am, I do,” I said.
She broke out in a big smile and said, “Why certainly you do. What do you have, darling?”
“I have a girl, age twelve, and a boy, age eighteen.”
“Why, honey, you don’t look old enough to have children that age.”
She squeezed my hand and went on with her recital. “And you know Nelda, don’t you? Your mother lived with her after she ran away from the farm. Nelda was always the class clown. Look at her! She’s still at it. Bless her heart, she wouldn’t understand decorum if it rose up and slapped her in the face.”
I looked and, sure enough, Nelda was making goofy faces—at age seventy-eight!
“Nelda was always getting into trouble, you know. Made the teacher spray ink all over herself one time when Nelda substituted ink for the teacher’s cologne. Miss Krebs used to spray herself several times a day. Said it helped diffuse the odor her students exuded after they’d spent time on the playground. She was a bit la-dee-da, you know.
“Now, Doris—you know Doris, don’t you, honey? Nelda’s older sister?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I knew all the Casons. They’d let my mother live with them and finish high school after my grandfather decided that education was wasted on girls and that he needed her to work full time on the farm.
“Doris was the serious one. Class president and organizer of every event we had at school. Her parents made her wait to start school ‘cause she was a winter baby. So she and Nelda ended up in the same class.”
She went on. “‘Course, you know what we always called Lenora, don’t you?”
I shook my head. “No, ma’am, I don’t.”
“Lenora was always the pretty one. If we wanted a boy to talk to us, we’d go stand by Lenora. Sooner or later some boys would come over.”
I laughed but found it difficult to adjust to my mother being called Lenora. When she and my father first began to date, he, being a North Georgia farm boy, found it difficult to wrap his mouth around the name “Lenora.” Since mother’s maiden name was McCook, Daddy took to calling her “Cookie” and it stuck. That was all I’d ever heard her called in Dublin.
The reception for the 1928 Purple Martins was pretty jovial, considering the major topic of conversation, as far as I could tell, was who had died. The organizers handed out gold T-shirts with purple martins and Ware County High School on them. And these elderly women—none of the few remaining men were well enough to attend—pulled the shirts on over their permed and set hairdos and soft, lumpy bodies. Even my fashion-conscious mother! They lined up with their arms around each other and shouted out a purple martin school cheer. How they remembered it after sixty years was a mystery to me. This was just the kind of scene Charles Kuralt would have loved for his On the Road program.
I had never before heard of purple martins being the name of a team or a school mascot, but it somehow fit these women. Purple martins were considered important birds in South Georgia before air conditioning, when windows had to be left open at night during the summer. Back then, people strung rows of gourds in their backyards to entice the large, iridescent, bluish black birds to come nest there because purple martins are said to eat their weight in mosquitoes and other flying insects every day.
The reception lasted less than three hours. By that time, the honorees were tired. Most lived within easy driving distance and planned to return the next day for the luncheon my mother had planned.
When we were walking back to the car, Mother pointed out a woman walking ahead of us. “That’s Sally Leonard,” she said in a low voice. “She was the rich girl in our class. Her family had money year round because they had pine trees.”
“Pine trees?” I asked, “What do you mean?”
“The rest of us just had farm land. We only had an income during the growing season. But Sally’s family had both a farm and pine trees. In the winter, her family tapped the trees for sap and sold it to be made into pitch and turpentine. Sally had a special dress for church on Sundays.” Her voice was wistful.
I was stunned into silence by the thought of the little girl of sixty-odd years ago still longing for that special dress to wear on Sundays. I’d never realized. I’d never thought about what it meant to grow up “poor.” I’d always had so much; I’d taken it for granted that everyone wore nice clothes to church on Sundays. I thought of those little girls who had ended up with some of my favorite clothes when I was growing up. At the moment, I couldn’t remember if Mother had ever given away any of my “Sunday” dresses. I hoped so.
Back at the Holiday Inn after Mother had napped, we checked on the arrangements for the next day’s luncheon. As we worked, I could see more and more how important it was to her for everything to be perfect. Her schoolmates had known her as the daughter of a hardscrabble farmer, pulling a tobacco living out of sandy soil far off the main road. Her mother had died in the Spanish flu epidemic when she was seven and her father had married her mother’s sister out of practical necessity. The sister’s husband had abandoned her and her five children and she needed a man’s support. My grandfather needed a woman to run his household and care for his children. Mother was the oldest and, consequently, always had to work hard—so hard, her young, damaged joints provided fertile ground for arthritis to settle in as she aged. I looked at the hands distributing the place cards on the U shaped table. The knuckles were swollen and gnarled. At an age when I had taken dance and piano lessons after school, my mother had spent her afternoons pulling tobacco leaves and hefting them on heavy sticks up into the curing barn to dry. Fortunately, my father had earned a good living, and I felt like my mother relished this opportunity to show her classmates how far she’d come from that dirt-poor little girl without a Sunday dress.
The next day, my mother’s classmates arrived promptly at twelve, a few with husbands in tow. The smell of the multiple colognes was overpowering until the roast beef, vegetables, salad, and rolls were brought in to challenge it. The stories began again—not just from Myrtle, but from the others as well, some of whom took issue with Myrtle’s versions.
With several contributing her own version of each story, I learned that Nancy had played half a basketball game with her uniform pants ri
pped all the way up her backside. Myrtle had been the first to try make-up in their class—with disastrous results, which the teacher had made her wash off. In my opinion, the teacher was still needed. When it came to make-up, Myrtle seemed to think more was better. My mother had attracted a boy who was so smitten with her that her friends had taken to calling him “the shadow.” Everywhere they went, he was sure to be nearby.
Most of the stories were told on Nelda. I heard the ink story and a hooky story (she got caught) and a story about how she shaved her legs and tried to hide the fact from her mother by letting down the hems of her dresses and claiming she’d shrunk.
As my mother and her friends told their stories, they occasionally made references to things that only they knew about. They would say code words and laugh. It was a treat to see how my mother interacted with her schoolmates. These women didn’t seem elderly at all. They were funny, intelligent, charming, and appealing. I watched in amazement as a personality I’d never experienced in our household emerged from my mother. This Lenora was coquettish, a teaser, someone who reminded her friends of past faux pas, and poked them in the ribs for emphasis. I saw the girl my mother had been sixty years ago and wished I could have known her then and been one of her friends.
The luncheon was over too soon. After lengthy good-byes and checking out of the motel, we drove around to all the places Mother wanted to see before going back to Dublin. We went past a friend’s pink Victorian house, gussied up with white wooden lacework along the porch and the gables. We drove over a creek where Mother told me she’d been baptized when she was twelve. And we went past the house where Mother had cooked and cleaned house after school to pay her expenses after she ran away. But she didn’t mention going by one place.
“Mother, aren’t we going to go by the farm?” I asked.
She looked at me and then stared straight ahead. “I’d just as soon forget it. I don’t have any good childhood memories. When I lived there,” she said, “we barely had enough to keep us all fed and clothed. Actually, we didn’t keep ourselves clothed. The ladies from the churches in town did that. They’d come out to the farm with paper bags full of old clothes for us and we’d pick through them and try to find the closest sizes to what we were. I hardly ever found shoes to fit. And the clothes were never in good condition. We had to patch them and sew up seams and try to get stains out. Nobody ever gave us nice, pretty clothes to wear. I used to dream about being rich and buying new clothes in bright colors.”
A light of understanding dawned on me. For the first time, I truly understood why mother had given away my good clothes—my best clothes—when I was growing up. Because of her own childhood experiences, she’d made it her mission to see that other children in unfortunate circumstances never had to wear old, patched, and stained clothes like she had.
I didn’t say anything more and kept driving. Just before I got to the junction that would have put us on the main road out of town, she said, “Well, maybe we could just drive down the road and see if it’s still there. It’s probably fallen down by now.”
She directed me down another road that made a loop through palmetto studded pine forests and began looking for the turnoff. We finally spotted a graveled road in the right place and turned onto it. I could sense the tension in my mother increase the closer we got to the place where she’d spent such a hard childhood. A half-mile down the road, we spotted it.
I had memories of the farm from when I was a little girl, but it never looked like this. The house was painted a pretty blue with white trim and green shutters and white wicker rockers lined the front porch. There was a little patch of grass in the front and a walkway with pink vinca on either side of it led to the porch steps. The outbuildings, as well, seemed sturdy and well maintained—quite different from the ram-shackled buildings of my memory.
With a sharp intake of breath, my mother exclaimed, “Oh, my.”
When we drove up, a woman came out. We introduced ourselves and explained who we were and why we were there. Mrs. Walters, as she introduced herself in turn, generously invited us to look around all we pleased.
“I can hardly believe my eyes,” Mother said, looking at what she was seeing as if it were a banquet for her eyes. We walked to the old well and noticed it was just decorative now.
“If you only knew how many gallons of water I had to draw from this well and lug to the house or the barn!” she said, shaking her head.
She pointed to a large rock that formed an accent piece in a bed of blooming daffodils and said, “That’s where I used to sit when I plucked the down off the geese for our feather beds.”
“While they were alive?”
“Of course. The only time we killed a goose was at Christmas. We needed them for their eggs and their down. I’d sit with their heads caught between my legs and pluck the down from their tails.”
I couldn’t imagine that. Mother was telling me things today she’d never mentioned the whole time I was growing up.
We walked toward the stable where Dan, the plow horse, lived in my childhood memory. The barn was in good repair and a tractor was parked inside.
“They must be making a living here,” Mother said. “I guess it’s easier when you don’t have ten mouths to feed.”
Walking back toward the house, she pointed to a spot next to the back door. “That’s where our potato hill was.”
“What’s a potato hill?” I asked, totally clueless.
“It’s a hill made for storing sweet potatoes through the winter. We didn’t have a root cellar for them. First, we dried the potatoes in the sun, then we layered them with dirt and straw between each layer until we had a hill. When we wanted potatoes, we’d scrap off a layer of dirt and pull out the potatoes.”
Amazing, the things I was learning!
Back at the house, Mother stopped and looked at it a long time. I could only imagine the flood of memories rushing through her mind.
“Mama,” I said, “look at all you overcame to get to where you are now. They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
“Well, I must be as strong as Arnold Schwarzenegger, then,” she said with a grin.
I chuckled as a vision of my mother with bulging muscles flitted through my mind. I was thrilled that her tension had faded and it appeared she’d finally begun to gain a healthy perspective on her past.
We thanked Mrs. Walters, declining her invitation to stay for a glass of sweet tea, and got back on the road to Dublin.
After a few miles in silence, I looked over and saw a smile playing on Mother’s lips.
“You know,” she said, “Myrtle hasn’t learned one new thing about make-up in sixty years.”
I laughed. “She did overdo it a bit, didn’t she?”
“And Nelda is proof that some people never change.” She paused a moment, reflecting, and added, “Sometimes that’s good.”
Author’s note: People like to talk about the “steel magnolias” of the South. Most of the time they’re referring to the women who keep their men and their children under their control while letting them think all the choices they make are their own. Sometimes the expression refers to women who take over and run the family businesses after their husbands die. And sometimes it describes women like former Georgia governor Zell Miller’s mother, who, after she was widowed, built a house for herself and her children with her own hands, carrying the heavy stones from a creek to the building site.
My mother was a steel magnolia, a real Southern lady. Though not all of the above story is true, my mother survived a childhood of back-breaking hard work and an unsympathetic father who was too overcome with his own responsibilities to pay attention to his children individually. She did what was necessary to get an education and a good job where she met my father. And, in spite of her upbringing, became a lovely, gracious, caring woman who never forgot what it felt like to be
poor and needy. I treasure her memory and the example she set.
Creamed Corn
8 ears sweet corn (Silver Queen or comparable)
butter or margarine
flour
milk
salt and pepper to taste
Cut kernels off corn, cutting some in half, then scrape down to the cob, reserving the corn “milk”
Melt 2-4 tablespoons butter over medium heat
Add 1/4 cup flour to melted butter and stir in with a fork
Add milk gradually, stirring it in, until liquid is thick and smooth.
Add corn and corn “milk” gradually, stirring it in.
Simmer about 20 minutes, stirring to prevent milk from scorching.
Salt and pepper to taste.
Serves 6.
Note: My Daddy who was raised on a North Georgia farm preferred his creamed corn cold and covered in pepper.
Barbie’s Elopement
or
The Pink Pig Says I do
by
Sandra Chastain
If you love somebody, let them go. If they return, they were always yours. If they don’t, they never were.
—Anonymous
I NEVER see a pig that I don’t think of weddings and the summer of 1948.
Southern weddings have always been events, though not the kind we see on television where there are expensive invitations, exotic floral decorations, lavish dinners and receptions. When I was growing up, the florist decorated with waxy green Smilax vines pulled from the woods, candles, and whichever flower was in season.
The true measure of your social position was the number of attendants in the wedding. The more bridesmaids, the more popular the bride. The end result was most girls filled a closet in their house with once-used bridesmaid gowns. The bride’s selection of the dress was invariably accompanied with the familiar phrase, “It’s a little expensive but it can definitely be worn again.” It was and it couldn’t.
More Sweet Tea Page 14
