tribute

I find myself full of words bouncing around in the old noggin but no voice to speak with so I'm learning the joys of temporary sign language and listening. It's a perfect opportunity on Mother's day eve for me to pay tribute to my one and only, Janice Ann. She grew up on Pate Street next door to her maternal grandparents Ockie and Ethel with her parents Geraldine and Harold. The eldest of three, she had a sister and baby brother. When she was a teenager, they lived right across the street from Dyersburg High school on College street and their home was a convenient hangout for all the kids. Just a half block from downtown where my grandfather owned a service station and real estate business, they were the perfect beaver cleaver lookin' family. Both girls went off to college and returned with husbands in tow. Janice chose to marry Billy after a long courtship and separation due to military duty. I was born just a year after that. No rest for the weary! They packed me up and moved the whole thing back to Dyersburg from UTMartin after Daddy graduated with a degree in agriculture. When I was somewhere around a year old they moved into the red log cabin that we still call home. My Pawpaw recommended my daddy as farm manager to the folks who owned this piece of land, and he turned it over to him. When I was three, Pawpaw died and my mother's world has never been the same since. To this day, and she is 78 years old, she cries when she talks about him and how close they were.

Janice Ann quickly became a farm wife and mother, jumping into the whole grow/plant/can thing to make use of the bounty that my daddy's yearly garden produced. We laugh now when we talk about those hot summer nights when she listened for jars to pop before heading to bed on a a school/work night. It wasn't funny then. There ended being three of us as well, with two younger brothers following me into this world. They got the full dose of growing up boy in the country and I just pouted a lot and tried to learn how to have a social life that far away from town. She taught me the joy of cooking, and the thrill of experimenting to find just the right recipe. Most of hers were handed down through the generations and passed on through her friends to be used in her weekly newspaper column " Houdini in the House". After that she went to work for the state of TN as a claims adjudicator for unemployment benefits. She walked out of there one day after working with the public for years and never even earning SS benefits for herself. Around the age of 50, she said to heck with it because her health was beginning to suffer from all the stress. She was there and willing to keep my daughter when she was born, and to begin handing down to her all of the traditions that we had begun as mother and daughter. Looking back, that was a huge blessing. I never took her for granted and cherished the time that she allowed me to be with my friends to keep my sanity.

One of her greatest sanity keepers was the bridge club that played on a regular schedule year in and year out as long as I can remember and still TO THIS DAY meets every other week. She was always involved in the community and was a fierce advocate of the Dyer County Fair Association, something that she and daddy did together and involved all of us kids in. If there is one gift that I could give my mama this year, it would be the ability to let go of being sorry for things and live in the moment. She spends so much of her time feeling bad that other people have to help her that she robs herself of the joy of being served by those who truly love her.

Following retirement she became a volunteer with our local volunteer blood service organization and at the hospital. She was always the one who kept up with the family crises in the ICU waiting room, ushering worried relatives in and out during visitations with patients and picking up the fried chicken sacks left behind. I still miss seeing her little gray head poking over that desk when I walk down the second floor hall.

This one's for you mom....for all that you've accomplished and stand for and for the love that you've managed to spread around our little earth while you've been on it. You are my hero, my friend and always my advocate and that's my definition of a perfect mother. Thank you for sacrificing yourself in ways that I will never know so that I could have what I wanted and didn't need and for teaching me to be honest, fair and always reliable. Those traits have served me well.