A Beautiful Dream

Published by Charleston Gazette - Sunday, April 29, 2007


WEST VIRGINIA HILLS

                                       

       A humble woman with only an eighth grade education, my grandmother was married at sixteen, and soon after her first child was born, she and my grandfather migrated from a farm in Alabama to the coalfields of WV, where he went to work in the coalmines.  As the years passed, they were blessed with more children until there were five—three boys and two girls.

      They didn’t have a lot of money, but my grandmother was resourceful.  She planted and tended a garden, canning her yield at the end of each summer—insuring vegetables for her family all winter.  She also raised chickens and, on Sundays, would pick the fattest hen from the coop, wring its neck with her bare hands, throw it into a galvanized tub, cover it with boiling water, remove the feathers, cut it up and make a tasty platter of golden fried chicken for Sunday dinner. She made clothes for her children, crocheted beautiful afghans, made quilts, and cultivated colorful flower gardens.  She was almost never idle.

      Even so, because my mother worked, I, an only child, was sent to my grandmother’s every spring when school was out for the summer.  My fondest childhood memories are of the summers spent there.  No matter how busy my grandmother was, she always found time to sit on the porch swing with us children on those warm summer nights…telling stories of her childhood, such as the time her brother accidentally chopped her finger off with an ax while chopping wood. She would also sing silly songs—some of which would remain in our impressionable young minds forever…to be passed on to our children and grandchildren.
   

      Her youngest child was only three months older than I was; therefore, my Aunt Betty was also my playmate and best friend. Together, we made the most unforgettable memories, during the summers of our childhood, in that little coal mining town in the hills of West Virginia.

      When my grandmother died, at 79, Betty shared a letter with her family that she had received from her mother a few years before. In it, this uneducated woman managed to impart her feelings about life as a young wife, mother and grandmother in a way that touched every heart in the room.  Apparently, she was reflecting upon her life and musing about her mortality as she wrote to her youngest daughter.

      She wrote of the happiness she felt as a young bride and the indescribable joy of giving birth to each of her children.  She reminisced about things that happened as they grew to be adults—each of them getting married and starting families of their own.

      In the last paragraph, she mourned for the years that had passed much too quickly, and expressed gratitude for her large family of five children, ten grandchildren, sixteen great-grandchildren and two great-great grandchildren.  Miraculously, she called each one by name; and at the end of her letter she wrote, “It all seems like a dream—a beautiful dream!”

      Some say I'm like my grandmother. I suppose there are some similarities; I also married young, and had five children.  In the early years, I even made some of my children’s clothing, learned to crochet and canned fresh vegetables from our garden.  However, I never had chickens!

       I, too, feel that time has passed much too quickly, and sometimes I ask myself, “Who fast-forwarded from the years of wiping noses, kissing boo-boos, and drying tears to a house that’s much too quiet with only two people living in it?”

       It seems like only yesterday that I took the oldest child for his first day of school, and then, the second, third, fourth and fifth.  Then came the years of homework, ballgames, cheerleading, shopping trips, proms, first dates and broken hearts—and I could never forget the uncontrollable excitement of five children on Christmas morning! Nor could I forget the weddings, the births of each of the seven grandchildren; or the sheer delight I have felt when spending time with them.  At times I have returned to my childhood to play a game of “make believe”, and have been so convincing that a grandson once asked, when he was three years old, “Maw-Maw, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

       I wonder if the three great-grandchildren that have joined our family in recent years will ask the same question.

      Now that I am “a senior citizen”, with both of my parents gone, and my own mortality is becoming a reality, I often reflect upon the past and find myself thinking….

      “It all seems like a dream—a beautiful dream!”

This story also appears in my book, Somewhere In Heaven My Mother Is Smiling~