From Flour Sacks To Satin

Saying Goodbye

A book is expected to end after farewell comments, but this one begins with Mama in her final hours at a nursing home where she lived for eight years.  She passed her 100^th birthday by seven months.  Now, with gangrene in both feet, she opted to let the disease take its course rather than have both legs amputated.  Her feet were already black, and her legs sagged with dark fluid.  I sat by her bed and held the gnarled hands that cared for us and worked to hold the family together.  She drifted in and out of slumber, no doubt drug-induced to ease her pain.  She would wake, smile, and tell me she loved me.  Nurses paused by the door and looked in on us.  I was planning a trip to New York to receive an award and hoped she could live until I returned. 

Mama opened her eyes and asked, “Do you remember when times were so hard and it seemed everyone was down on us that Dad and I always said that life is a long road that never turns?  Looking back, it has been a long road through many trials and much suffering, but there have been many rewards.”

I picked up her hands, gnarled from years of farm work, traced blue veins with a fingertip, and thought of when I was seven or eight how she could play the piano.  She was blessed with the musical ability to play smoothly.  I remember leaning on the end of my grandparents’ upright piano while Mama played “Over the Waves,” and I imagined dancing over the waves across the ocean to another country.  She would play the “Ben Hur Chariot Race” so perfectly it sounded like rumbling wheels and pounding horses rounding the coliseum of Rome.  One of my favorites was “In the Sweet Bye and Bye.”  Her youngest sister, Della, would play and sing, “You’re a Grand Old Flag” along with many more.  She taught the grandchildren to play “The Old Gray Mare” using their knuckles.  My brother, Landrum, inherited musical ability, but I could not get the rhythm.  Music was a mystery to me.  My talent was more methodical.  I later learned to play some but only by notes.  Grandma kept that piano for years after the girls married.  She gave it to Mama a few days before I left home to attend a business college.  Mama could have played in concert halls, but she met a young handsome blond with blue-violet (yes violet) eyes.  He was much older than Mama, and he was smitten with the blue-eyed, curly black- haired farm girl while he was working on the farm for her father.  When they married, he worked in a furniture store in the village of Rio Vista; and they lived in a white bungalow.  Mama said she would get out her schoolbooks, look at them, and think about finishing her last year of high school.  But she was afraid of what people would think of her going back after getting married.  Dad graduated from Rio Vista High School in 1903.  Education meant a great deal to him.  He was always interested in increasing his vocabulary.

Three years after they were married, Landrum was born in 1913.  Two years later, I entered this world at sundown.  The attending nurse told Mama, “Look at all that black hair, but her eyes look like she has the weight of the world on her.”  Later, my hair turned to dark auburn.

The business part of Rio Vista caught fire and burned the night of July 14, 1914.  The town did not recover from this disastrous fire because many businessmen lost everything.  Changes were on the way due to black Fords, which made it convenient for shopping in Cleburne.  Therefore, Dad turned to ranching and moved all of us to Lubbock.

I was about two years old when we lived on a ranch near Lubbock.  It was there I toddled off to an overflow tank from the windmill and was drowning when Landrum pulled me out and spanked me all the way to the house.  He was only four years old.  I do not remember this, but the family told me.  His quick-thinking saved me from drowning.

We had young cowboys working with us, and my parents took great delight in introducing them to peanut butter.  “How do you eat it?” one man asked.