Dear Reader:
This quote from Madeleine L’Engle made me pause and reflect on all the stages of my life, but especially my childhood, yesterday.
As I studied photos of my childhood, from old, dusty albums, I realized that some of my pre-conceived remembrances of certain parts of it were actually mis-conceived.
The picture above is of myself and my siblings, Ben and David…and my Grandmother Wilson in the background…mother’s mother. The cotton farmer’s wife and early graduate of Erskine Women’s College…the keeper of stories.
It seems like so many of my earliest childhood memories deal with the death of my father, Grandfather Wilson, and the loss of my mother’s left hand to cancer…all arriving within the same year… weeks and months apart.
Yet when I look at the picture now of the three of us with Grandmother Wilson… taken about a year and a half following the sudden and unexpected tragedies…everything looks normal. Grandmother Wilson has a little proud smile on her face and we all seem quite secure and cared for…
All my aunts and uncles, on both sides of the family, stepped up to the plate following so much loss in one family in such a short period of time.
My Aunt Eva, mother’s sister, took us under her wings and I remember spending time with them on their farm house outside Simpsonville…with my cousins, her two sons, Bobby and Don. Again…we appear well-adjusted and happy.
It was these (following) two pictures, however, that provided an “aha” moment for me in my recollections of the most turbulent time in my family’s history. (1954)
Even though this first picture is somewhat “fuzzy”…you can see that mother has a sling on her arm…it had just been amputated due to bone cancer. (Like me, before my second chemo treatment when I got my hairdresser to go ahead and shave my head, mother had her beautiful long hair cut before her surgery so she could handle it better with just one hand. In one year her hair turned completely gray…definitely prematurely…but it was a beautiful gray as she got older.)
The one thing I remember about mother…is that she always dressed “to the hilt.” She never, ever (in my entire life) looked slouchy or sloppy. And she dressed us all the same way. Amazing woman.
And now for the photo that showed me where I got my faith from…By the date on the picture…it has been three months since the amputation…mother was wearing a fitted “sock” on her arm where the hand was removed (she had not even been fitted for a prosthesis yet.)
It is the expression on her face that stunned me and my memory of this period. She is smiling…not a forced smile…but a very natural confident one..with me in one of my many pretty dresses that I wore on a daily basis. (As a little girl I was rarely “shot” in a photo with pants on. Interesting?)
Now, as an adult, looking back on this time….I finally see mother as she was…a woman of quiet faith and strong courage...the same woman who gave me life and her strong sense of faith and courage to take with me through my own journey. What better gifts can we receive?
So until tomorrow…Let us never forget the people around us who made us who we are today and thank them each day in thought and prayer for helping define the person we are becoming.
” Today is my favorite day” Winnie the Pooh
*Brooke sent this photo of her young adoring neighbors….love it! And they all love “Miss B”!
*God’s Wink came to me yesterday on the anniversary of September 11 in a most beautiful way. A “renegade” moon flower vine decided to climb a flag pole rather than a bench leg and this was what I saw last evening.
