Aunt Anna May

When the mail arrived yesterday, it contained a letter from my cousin Donald.  I didn't need to open it to know its contents.  My Aunt Anna May had passed.  She died on Sunday, January 7, 2012, just a few months shy of her 99th birthday.  This last Christmas card from her son, Donald and his wife Faye, told us she had been placed in a nursing home.  She had been mentally sharp all her life...until the last few months.  I knew what was coming when I read their Christmas card. I just didn't expect it so soon.

Aunt Anna May was the survivor of five siblings, my mother, Rosalind, the oldest, my aunt Clara, my uncle Bill, and her twin sister who died as a child during the Flu Epidemic of 1918-1919. Aunt Anna May also buried two husbands, Loy Light and Frances Lamastus.

I hadn't intended for this post to be an obituary. I wanted to record some of my memories of her before those, in time, faded.  She lived a rough, tough life on a farm from the days before tractors until the death of her first Husband, Loy, in the 1970s. She lived near my Father's farm in Franklin County when she married her second husband, Frances.  When Frances died unexpectedly a few years later, she returned to her family farm and lived near Donald and Faye.

My most vivid memory of her was from a visit made one weekday when I was in grade school. School had just ended. My Grandmother, who lived with us, wanted to go down to the Aunt Anna May's family farm near Cairo, IL.

It was a warm, sunny morning when we pulled off the highway onto the gravel road that lead to the farm. It was a short drive, about a half-mile, past the Olive Branch Baptist Church and over a ridge.  When we topped the ridge, we could see the farm and a cloud of dust in the field on the opposite side of the road from the farm-house.

Uncle Loy and Aunt Anna May were planting beans.  Uncle Loy was driving the old, green, John Deere tractor. Behind the tractor was a modified horse-drawn planter.  Aunt Anna May sat on the planter to operate it and to raise the planter and guide arms at the end of each row.

She wore an old floppy straw hat, worn jeans with torn knees, and a long-sleeved blue work shirt.  Her ensemble was finished with a red bandanna tied around her face. When we met her, the dirt around her eyes were reminiscent of the face of a raccoon.

Anna May looked more like her father, tall and slender. She never had a weight problem. She did add a few pounds in the last decade or so but that was compensation for all the decades when she needed a few pounds and didn't have them.

Another memory was a visit we made one weekend. There was a church reunion on Sunday. When we arrived, Aunt Anna May was in the back yard, standing over a stump with her hatchet, killing chickens for the Sunday dinner.  She'd grab a chicken, CHOP!, toss the chicken aside and grab another.  There were two-three chickens flopping, running around without heads and a few more in a small wire cage.  Next to her was a cauldron of boiling water over a fire.  The water was to scald the chickens and make plucking the feathers easier. It was a familiar scene.  At home, on similar occasions, Mom and Grandma would do the same. One difference was that Mom and Grandma preferred to wring the chicken's neck instead of wielding a hatchet.

Aunt Anna May and Uncle Loy didn't have much money. One Christmas they came up and brought me a present.  It was a hand-made bow and arrow set. Uncle Loy made the bow by hand from a limb off an Ash tree.  Aunt Anna May made the arrows using turkey feathers and Indian arrow heads they found on their farm.

In 2001, we visited her bringing our daughter Jennifer and our year-old grandson, Andrew.  We spend the day visiting with her, Donald and Faye, talking and watching  a dozen or more Hummingbirds flying around a trellis and an attached Hummingbird feeder.

She was my favorite. Oh, how I miss her.