June 09, 2012
She was born near Raleigh North Carolina to a fairly well to do dairy farmer. Despite this, and to the astonishment of
all, she married one of the field hands...a scrappy but utterly
impoverished young man from the streets of Newport News who had moved
south in search of work. She followed him to the coast where he built
houses and rented them. She bore him a son, then saw him off to war and
waited 4 years until he returned in traction. She nursed him back to
health, bore him another son, stood by and supported him as he built a
business from nothing, built a boat, and became one of the most sought
after charter boat captains on the Crystal Coast. A decade ago she
buried him, and tonight, just after dinner she joined him.
Despite her age, it was a bit of a shock. She had actually been improving by leaps and bounds over the last few
months and had regained the ability to walk. Nevertheless, my
grandmother, who was born in an utterly different world, passed
quite suddenly this evening a little after 6.
The things she'd seen, the change she'd experienced...it truly boggles the
mind.
She was born before women could vote.
For a
third of her life there was a polio season. For the first decade of her
life there was no electricity in her house. She saw the great
depression, a world war the cold war, Jim Crow, integration, all six
moon landings, and the Berlin Wall go up and come down. She saw the
introduction of radio, then television and then the internet. She saw
all the other
things that transpired over nearly a century.
Now, in the blink of an eye, all that perspective has left us.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
11:30 PM
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