FAMILY – PRAYER AVAILETH MUCH

This perhaps is the home from which come my most vivid early childhood memories. I really don't know why, but this home seemed to leave a special place in my heart. Again, it was just an old country farmhouse but I treasure the good times we had there. I believe it was during this period that our mother began to long for the freedom she had experienced with our father. While our grandparents and all of our mother's family was strong in their religious faith and steeped in the Methodist religion and its traditions, my mother had experienced a different, more evangelical worship style in my father's Pentecostal faith. In fact she too had been ordained a minister in what was then the Church of God, later to become the Church of God of Prophecy. From time to time, not frequently, a family would come and get all of us and take us to church in the City, as Grandpa would refer to it and thus we became reintroduced into the evangelical way of worship. My earliest memories include those of my "twenty-something" year old mother every night openly on her knees in fervent prayer in the bedroom we all shared. Her faith was lived out in every facet of her life and served her and her family very well in storms and in Sonshine.

FAMILY – RESPONSIBILITY EXPECTED AND ACCEPTED

Because our mother always had to work we three sisters learned at an early age to take care of each other and the home. At the time we moved into our first home I was five, my second sister seven and the oldest nine years old and we each had our assigned chores. My mother and my oldest sister would spend the day picking cotton. My second sister and I had the dishwashing and housecleaning chores. Water was heated on the stove and the dishpan was set up on the kitchen table. I would sit on the side of the table and wash as my sister dried and put away. Over the next few years we would move several times, inching toward complete independence from our grandparents. Independent relationship? Yes. Broken relationship? Never. To this day our aunts, uncles and cousins continue to be very much a part of our lives and our love for each other. Our next home would be a slight step up as it afforded greater opportunity for our livelihood. Again my mother would work in the cotton field, but this landowner also had a dairy where my oldest sister could work and help out. This set the pattern for our entire lives -- my oldest sister building that helper/caretaker bond with my mother.

FAMILY – DISCIPLINE SURE AND EFFECTIVE

Our mother, much like her father, was a strong disciplinarian. She seldom had to speak twice to get our attention; never issued empty threats. Patient and just as she was, if discipline was needed, and deserved, you could be sure it would come. Once, on a warm spring day as we played in the yard, Mother sat with Grandma and a couple of aunts on the back porch engaged in pleasant conversation and laughter. Mother told me to do some chore and audaciously I spoke up and said No, I won't do it. I knew those words should never have left my mouth and I headed around the house as fast as I could go. In a flash she had hit the ground and was right behind me but I was an excellent runner and escaped into the back door and took refuge under a bed. She patiently allowed me to stay there. But the time came there was reckoning. When the older children arrived home from school later in the day, I foolishly allowed my uncle to lure me from under the bed promising candy. Lesson learned. On those very infrequent occasions when our mother was forced to administer corporal punishment, it was done with a keen little hickory switch. Often as not we would be the one sent to fetch it for her and then to suffer the indignity of the sting. The lessons learned from our mother's switchings would last a long time in our memories and the bad behaviors would seldom be repeated.