CLAY AND WATTLES

Happy Birthday, Mike!

I called Mike this morning on my way to work - he was in Birmingham, waiting to unload a truck.

I asked him if he felt any older and he said, why, no, he was only 25. Yeah, right, I said, so that makes me 35! "If you think 50 is something, just wait till you get 60!" I told him. We agreed that we don't know where the last decade has gone.

Mama Nick's Birthday Call and Other Thoughts on Easter

And Sunday at 12:04 (she was just waiting for after-church time) Mama Nick called me just beside herself that she'd forgotten my birthday. "I was lying in bed last night before I went to sleep and thought, oh, no, I didn't even think of Pat's birthday!" She was just frantic and I reassured her over and over it was fine and not to worry. "I'll get something in the mail to you this week!" she said. Then I told her we'd be home Easter and just to wait for whatever she was going to do, for when we'd be there.

I'm thankful she can live at home alone, but she is very frail and unable to do much. I asked if it would be okay if Sher came and spent the night there, too, and she said it was. "I won't be able to do much for ya'll," she told me, "but I'll do what little I can." The very thing that makes me always hesitate to go "home." And we should go more often. But I don't want her trying to do things for us, mainly, cooking. (And how I miss her wonderful meals! Just good old-fashioned vegetables, her wonderful fried chicken, cornbread, and Sock-It-To-Me cake! And biscuits!) I told her I'd make us all some soup and I'd make breakfast the next morning before Sher and I go to church at Pleasant Hill. "Promise me you won't try to do anything," I told her.

In church yesterday I was thinking how emotional it will be at Pleasant Hill on Easter Sunday, to be in the church that one of our great-great-uncles was pastor of many decades ago, and to know that "our people" are buried there just a few dozen feet away from the sanctuary. And Mama's monument is there, which Sher and I haven't seen. I hope there are some buttercups, or "yellow gal" or some kind of blooming plants in Mama Nick's yard that we can take to Mama's grave. We like natural/live/wild flowers to leave in remembrance of her.

These are two remarkable women, so strong, and I know that I have unintentionally taken for granted their legacy to me, to us. I'm not nearly as strong as these two wonderful women that God has so blessed me to have - my Mama and my Mama-in-love.