Hold Everything Lightly #3 {Mama and Vera}

Mama is from Hangingdog, North Carolina.

 It is a community of houses, churches, and a couple of stores scattered across the mountains in the western part of the state. It is remote and not a lot different now than when mama was  a child, except for the cabins with the designer kitchens. My grandaddy was an old widower with ten grown children when he married my young grandmother. They were dirt poor, meaning all that they ate came from what they could grow out of the earth or they did not eat. After fathering three children {one died} grandaddy died leaving my grandmother alone with two small kids in a tiny mountain cabin. I have a photo of my grandmother and two small dirty children standing in the doorway of an unpainted shack. They farmed the land and managed the hardscrabble life until grandmother died on my mothers fourteenth birthday of deep vein thrombosis {a blood clot} in her leg. Today she would have survived but not then and not in those mountains.

Mother moved to South Carolina to live with her much older half brother Lester and his wife, Vera.

 Uncle Lester had moved south to work at the large nuclear plant being constructed in Aiken county.  Lester and Vera had no children but longed for them. Vera was from Alabama and was traveling on a train when her appendix burst. She survived that emergency but was rendered infertile. God did by many strange ways provide her with four children. I was the fourth. She and Lester raised two boys from Alabama prior to mama's arrival. She had her hands full with my adolescent mother who had been cooped up in those mountains and now was close to a large city. It made for trouble, boy trouble. My mother was devoted to Aunt Vera as was anyone who knew her. In later years we were hesitant to speak Vera's name for mother would burst into tears. Vera impacted our lives with so much good it is hard to measure.

The account blurs for me here.

 I know that mother graduated from high school. Some where she meets daddy, a divorced man with two children.  I cannot see Aunt Vera approving of that at all. Perhaps my Grandaddy formidable as he was smoothed it over. Soon after I was born into that instant family of a brother and a sister. How I loved my big brother. My big sister who was old enough to remember her biological mother was rebellious and daddy not knowing any better at the time sent her off to the state girls schools for troubled youth. Dear Lord who could blame my sweet troubled sister for having her mother torn from her? Sending my sis to the girls school was an error on daddy's part as she came back badly scarred. Mama did the best she could with her new family and given her youth and temperament it was astonishing it lasted as long as it did.

For # 1 in the series go here

and for #2 here

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