my Dude’s birthday is today October 20, 1898

(d. April 19, 1972)

This picture of my grandmother greets me every time I sit down at my desk – Lots of love, Mother is the inscription on this old photograph we found in my mother’s random pictures when Pretty and I were cleaning out her home for the last time in 2007. The picture is framed just as it was when we found it; I wonder how old my grandmother was when this picture was taken. She looks so very young to me, but then I was born when she was a 48 year old widow struggling to make ends meet – already much older than her years.

When I was a toddler my parents and I moved in with my grandmother who became my closest friend and center of warmth in my family until I became a teenager. Bernice Louise Schlinke Boring was the daughter of Bertha Emeline Selma Buls Schlinke who was the daughter of Sophie Bartels Schawe Buls, a German immigrant from Brandenburg who as a widow married Joachim Buls in Texas in 1869. I am the daughter of Selma Louise Boring Morris Meadows who was the daughter of the woman in the picture above.

I honor the memory of my grandmother today which would have been her 123rd birthday. One day women may live to celebrate more than a century of life, but for today I remember Dude who loved me without reservation, who always had my back, who enjoyed watching I Love Lucy, Groucho Marx and Lawrence Welk on tv with me, who shared my secret of staying up to watch our favorite shows while pretending to be asleep when Mama and Daddy got home from Wednesday night prayer meeting, who baked the best cherry pies on Sunday morning and the best kolaches on Sunday afternoon, who sent me package after package of her homemade red velvet and peach cakes when I was in college, who wrote letters in bizarre handwriting she picked up from her few grades of grammar school…

I wish I had known then what I know now.

You were simply the best.

***************

Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and please stay tuned.