Sunday, April 8, 2001
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Sunday, April 8, 2001 |
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End of an era By MARY JANE HOLT
t is Tuesday morning and I've put this off as long as I can. Normally I write my columns on Friday mornings. That's been my ritual for more than a dozen years. It also has been my ritual to write from my heart. Most of the time it's easy to do that. Sometimes it is not. Daniel's mom died on Friday. She drew her last little short puff of breath about the time I would normally be sitting down to peck away at what you read in this space each week. We had gone back to Albany on Thursday morning. She knew we were there. We think she was aware that her children were near right up until about 12 to 14 hours of her death. Maybe she was aware until the very end. I think I hope so. The emptiness is hard. Hard to feel. Hard to think about. Hard to write about. She was the last of our four parents to go. A link to the past, to our roots, to what came before, is gone now. We don't like what has happened. I have encouraged Daniel to talk. He was the youngest of her seven children. "Tell me how you feel," I say. He can't. My brothers and sisters gave him two red tip photinias. They decided they would give him something that would live rather than send flowers that would wither by the grave. He planted them yesterday at the entrance to our home. But the withering flowers are appreciated too. Not only do they brighten a dark day, they give those who grieve something to do in the funeral home on visitation night when they feel so lost. Through their tears family members walk around and around the crowded, empty room reading the cards. Delta was well represented. Daniel was proud. The Delta family didn't just send flowers. The people came, too. Tim and Ray and Stacy and Jerry ... They were there. And friends from yesteryear came from all over. Folks who haven't been seen or heard from in decades showed up. Boys of long ago who ate at her table many times came to pay their respect one last time. She was quite renowned for her table. I've mentioned her Sunday dinners before in this column. They deserve more than a mention. One daughter commented about how hard her mom always worked and how she never really understood what those Sunday dinners meant. "They (her mom and dad) must have spent their entire grocery allowance to buy and fix for us when we all would come home ..." she said. She talked like it was a hardship for them. I never saw it that way. It was their way of life. Food, its preparation and the serving of it was what Grandma knew. It was what she did. It clearly was what she enjoyed. Granddaddy would joke about the spread, "Now y'all need to eat all this food," he'd say. "What you leave I'll have to eat all week." Nothing went to waste. Her ham pie was known far and wide. As I recall, she preboiled her ham slices, then spread them all around in the biggest pan I ever saw. After breaking eggs over each piece of ham and following that with a liberal application of salt and pepper, she topped the dish with pastry strips before she baked it. It's probably been a decade or so since she's been able to stand in a kitchen long enough to cook a ham pie. ... I especially remember the cakes. I think she baked eight cakes for my first Christmas in the family. And I remember how the men always ate first at the family gatherings while the children ate in another room. The women would eat after the men were done. It was their way. That crowded kitchen drove me nuts from day one. The heat could be unbearable at times. And everybody bumping into everybody made me claustrophobic. It especially irritated me that I did not get to eat with my husband. In time, I grew to appreciate their way. To recognize the culinary efforts of the women who stayed in the kitchen as the labor of love that it was. Such kitchen duty was more than a labor of love. What I observed when I married into the Holt family marked the end of an era, not just in my husband's family, but in the history of the South. No more do women cook all day on Saturday and rise up early, very early, well before dawn, to continue preparations for Sunday dinner. We buried more than a tired, worn out shell of a body that housed a woman well for 86 wonderful years of loving service and devotion to her family. We buried a Southern tradition on Sunday, April 1, 2001.
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