Yesterday was my Mama’s birthday. She would’ve
turned 75 if she were still living on this side of the River. Now she’s
living in a place where life is not measured in years, but is ladled
out in big dollops of joy.
I wish you could’ve known her, because
you would’ve loved her. And she would’ve loved getting to come up here
to see us in our new hometown in the Ozarks and getting to know some of
you.
How can I describe Mama to you?
Well, I can tell you what
she looked like ... In her last years, wizened from osteoporosis and
lung disease, she didn’t weigh 90 pounds soaking wet. But when I was a
little girl, she was a true beauty, tall and very slender, with
light-brown hair and green eyes and skin like silk — and the most
perfect nose I’ve ever seen.
When I was young and living in an old
family home in our little Mississippi town, a man I’d never met knocked
on my back door one morning. He turned out to be a native of the town,
a relative of my in-laws who was at that time a well-known neurosurgeon
in Memphis. While we were visiting, he  realized who my mother was.
“Lucile Adams was the most beautiful girl who ever grew up in Macon,”
he assured me very solemnly.
I don’t know about that, but I do know
she was voted “Most Beautiful” all four years at Macon High School.
When I found the old annuals at her mother’s house and asked her about
it, she just grinned and said, “Honey, this is a little town — there
wasn’t much competition.”

As beautiful as she was, Mama wasn’t the
least bit vain. I can just see her, putting on her makeup as she walked
through the house, slathering drugstore foundation over her cheeks and
dabbing on a little lipstick without even looking in the mirror.
She
loved pretty clothes, but hated to shop, so she might have on something
pretty and stylish, or she was just as liable to have on a pair of
faded denim “pedal-pushers” and some beat-up white Keds.
I can tell
you what she collected. Santa Clauses. White china angels.
Christmas-tree ornaments. R. S. Prussian china. Cranberry glass.
Letters and cards from her children. Pictures of her family.
I can
tell you what she was good at. Telling funny stories, usually making
fun of herself. Writing letters full of colorful details about our
family’s lives, brimming with love and encouragement. Growing things.
Perfectly folding an unwieldy fitted sheet. Matting and framing
pictures. Decorating for Christmas. Making pecan pie and cornbread
dressing and potato salad and the best fried chicken in the world.
I
can tell you what she didn’t like. Going very far away from home,
wherever that happened to be at the time. Mushrooms. People who hurt
her children.
I can tell you a few things that will give you an idea of what kind of person she was.
She
took stray kids into her heart and into her home. When my younger
brother and sisters were still at home, my folks were living in the DC
suburbs. Mama took in a succession of their friends, kids whose parents
had moved away before graduation, or who weren’t getting along with
their families. They all adored Mama, and never forgot her. They knew
she loved them.
One of her special kids was a black boy named
Curtis, who had been a friend of my brother’s in junior high school.
Curtis, who lived with his grandmother, had a hard life. Mama took up
time listening to him, and he knew he was always welcome at her house.
Curtis went down the wrong road, and ended up in prison for selling
drugs, but he stayed in touch with her. He would call Mama collect from
prison when he needed encouragement, because he knew she loved him and
was praying for him. He would send her cards on Mother’s Day.
I
can tell you what she loved ... She loved to laugh. She loved pie. She
loved birds, especially redbirds. She loved flowers. She loved pretty
antique china. She loved the old comedian, Jonathan Winters. She adored
babies, and could get a fussing little one to settle down with a magic
touch that I’m thankful to have inherited. She loved Christmastime. She
loved her children and grandchildren, her family and her friends. And
even though they were divorced after 30 years, and he married twice
more before his death, she never stopped loving my Daddy.
I can tell you a few of the memories of my mother I treasure most.
Mama
trying to teach us how to “Beat the Hambone,” a syncopated, rhythmic
clapping, foot-tapping game she had learned from her black friends on
the Mississippi farm when she was a little girl. Mama sitting at the
breakfast table in about 1963, teaching me how to play jacks, scooping
up the little metal stars so quickly you almost couldn’t see her
slender hand. Mama holding my babies, looking into their eyes like they
were windows into Heaven. Mama listening to me on the phone, laughing
her wonderful, infectious laugh. Mama reading “The Three Billy Goats
Gruff” to my little nephew Ben. Mama in her hospital bed, patting my
hand, opening her green eyes to look at me and give me her sweet smile
and tell me she loved me one more time.
Mama’s unconditional love
was something we could always count on. No matter what mistakes we
made, or how we might have disappointed her, we always knew we could
count on her to believe in us, to be on our side, to pray for us, and
to never stop loving us.
I believe Mama’s still doing all those things for her children.
-----
By Celia DeWoody
Copyright 2008 Harrison (Ark.) Daily Times
Published Dec. 17, 2008

Help! Does anybody know how to add code to link to a Picasa web album now that I'm using this Xanga themes doohickey so I can have a fancy page? I used to be able to paste the code for my web albums into a box on the Look and Feel page, and it would create a slideshow on my Xanga site of my Picasa web album, but on these Xanga themes, I can't find a box to paste the code into. Is it possible? 

Doyle and I ran away to the river this afternoon, and it was a lovely break from the past three or four weeks of packing and moving. We moved into our new house two weeks ago, and yesterday, we moved Doyle's mom, Ruby, in with us, so we've been busy!

A dose of Nature was just delightful. It was warm today, overcast, but the woods and the river had their own austere beauty.

If you'd like to see more photos of our Christmas-tree cutting expedition Saturday, and our Buffalo River trek today, see my newest Web album on this site ...
Hope y'all have had a great weekend!

I’m wishing I hadn’t already used the headline “Ghoulies and ghosties
and long-leggety beasties ...” for a column earlier this year about
mountain lions, and how we seem to enjoy the idea of scary creatures
sharing our old hills with us.
 Well,
since then, the idea of “ghoulies and ghosties” has come a little
closer to home than those alleged mountain lions out in the bluffs near
the Buffalo. A LOT closer to home!
You know we moved into our
new-old house last week. We’re having fun getting settled. We love the
spaciousness and the tall windows and the porches, and the big trees in
the yard, and the old pine floors and the quirky nooks and crannies.
But we’re not quite sure how we feel about the GHOST ...
Through
all my almost-53 years, I have never before encountered anything that
made me personally believe in haunted houses. When I was a senior in
high school, my family lived in a 1800s-era converted carriage house
near Newport, Rhode Island, where everyone else in the family claimed
to have heard spooky footsteps or even to have seen a ghostly figure.
Because I never had those experiences myself, I chalked the stories up
to my kinfolks’ vivid imaginations.
Well, right now I’m being forced
to change my opinion about the reality of house-hauntings. Odd things
keep happening, almost every day, at the interesting old house that —
just for fun — we’ve named “Squirrels’ Leap.”
The week before we
moved in, I was at the house by myself, painting on the second floor. I
was perfectly comfortable, not nervous, just thinking happy thoughts
about our new home. Right at dusk, suddenly, the house filled with a
combination of noises that at first I attributed to squirrels in the
walls or on the roof. Then I realized it was louder and heavier than
little squirrel feet — it sounded like somebody RUNNING through the
downstairs rooms, causing noise and vibrations through the second
floor. I laughed about it later and said the old house had more than
squirrels in the walls — maybe they were chimpanzees or wolverines,
judging by all the noise they were making. “Ghost” just never occurred
to me, so I kept on painting.
A day or two later, my son Jamie and I
were over at the empty house, looking around. The house suddenly filled
up with a delicious aroma that reminded me of baking apples, or maybe
apple cake. We looked at each other, puzzled.
“Where’s that smell
coming from?” The oven was off, and there weren’t even any pans in the
kitchen yet. In some rooms, the sweet scent was strong — in others, not
discernible at all.
Several times, doors have been found open that
we left closed, but the strange phenomenon that has puzzled me the most
is the white noise. We have a clock radio that is also a white noise
machine. For several years, we’ve gone to sleep with the noise set on
“Wind,” which makes a soothing, rushing noise that drowns out other
noises and is pleasant to fall asleep to.
Since moving into the new
house, every time I’ve set the machine on the wind setting and tried to
go to sleep, I’ve heard what sounds like a faint voice speaking a
phrase over and over and over again, under the wind noise. It’s similar
to what it sounds like when you’re in the house and can hear someone
talking outside, and even though you can’t understand the words, you
know it’s unmistakably the cadence of a human voice. The strange, muted
voice is so noticeable that I’ve had to get up and turn the noise
machine off because it was keeping me from sleeping. As soon as I turn
the machine off, the voice stops along with the wind noise. Once it
sounded like a man’s voice. Another time I thought it sounded more like
a woman, repeating the same indistinguishable phrase over and over
again.
Okay, here’s the incident that really gave me the creeps, and
pretty much made me a believer. There were just me, Roscoe the cat and
Hagrid the Great Dane in the house. Hagrid, who refuses to climb the
steep stairs, was downstairs. Kitty was keeping me company upstairs.
I
was in the bathroom getting dressed. The house was perfectly quiet.
Suddenly I heard the unmistakable sound of human footsteps. Step — step
— step — step — step — step — across the bare pine floor in the central
sitting area upstairs, right next to the bathroom. I called out,
“Doyle? Jamie?” No answer. I walked out into the sitting area. Only
Kitty was sitting there, perched on a chair, frozen, his eyes wide
open, terrified. He was staring in the direction the footsteps had
gone, toward Doyle’s office. No human was in the house but me.
Not
willing to believe it was a  ghost, I told myself, “Those footsteps
must have been Kitty walking across the floor. Maybe this old floor
just amplified his soft steps.”
Nope. Right then, Roscoe jumped down
from the chair and walked across the same section of floor the
footsteps had come from. With a fearful certainty, I realized that his
little white feet were perfectly silent as they padded across the floor.
I
don’t quite know what to think. I don’t get a feeling of evil or some
malevolent presence — it’s all just very, very strange. All of these
incidents are totally outside the realm of my experience, and I’m not
sure how to process them.
For almost 20 years in Mississippi, we
lived in a house much older than this one. Like all old houses, it made
noises. It popped and creaked and moaned in the wind. But I never heard
footsteps, or smelled baking when the oven was off, or heard a voice
murmuring through my white-noise machine.
Could our old house truly be haunted?

By Celia DeWoody
Published Dec. 10, 2008 Harrison (Ark.) Daily Times
Copyright 2008 CPI, Inc.

Super-busy week here in our world. We moved into our new/old house on Monday. I took that one day off, and have had a busy week with work, church stuff, and trying to unpack in the evenings. But we are so, so grateful to have our wonderful old house and to be getting it sort of straight.
Doyle's mom Ruby will move in next weekend. Hopefully we'll be a little more organized by then!
I did put out some Christmas decorations in the house last night, but that's ALL the Christmas preparations I've accomplished so far.
I loved getting out my Mama's little white porcelain angel choir, and the nativity scene my son Jamie gave me two years ago to replace the one we had when he was growing up that got lost in our move from Mississippi. And my Santa Clauses...including some from my mother's collection.
Can't wait to go chop down our REAL tree at the Christmas tree farm like we did last year. It was the most beautiful Christmas tree I've ever had in my life, and smelled SO good.
I'll put up photos of the progress we're making in unpacking and getting the house settled, as soon as I can!
What have YOU been doing this week?

PS- Remind me to fill y'all in on our GHOST!!!

   I have much, much to be
thankful for this year. Topping the list are all the dear people in my
life — my husband, my two boys, my three little sisters and their
families, my brother, my DeWoody in-laws, my kinfolks, my widespread
friends.
   Good health — something I usually take for granted — is
also at the top of my list of “Thank you’s.” My own good health, and
that of my husband and family, is one of our biggest gifts, and one I
am very grateful for this week. We have close friends who are
struggling with serious illnesses in their families, and as my heart
goes out to them and I pray for them, it makes me once again aware of
what a blessing it is that we currently don’t have anyone in the
hospital or the nursing home or the Hospice House.
   My Sunday School
teacher at the Methodist Church in Mississippi used to tell us, “If
you’re not in the middle of a crisis right now, you will be soon, so
enjoy the peaceful interlude while you can, and be grateful for it.”
   I
AM grateful for our health, and for our families and friends, for our
church, for our jobs, for our pets, for our adopted hometown of
Harrison, for our adopted homeland in the Ozarks. I am so thankful that
our good Father led us to this lovely place full of warm, caring people.
   Along
with all of these blessings is a new one that has just been given to us
in the past few weeks, and it is a big, big blessing: We’ve bought a
house in Harrison!
   We once felt a little bit like old Father
Abraham, leaving most of our kinfolks behind in south Florida and
moving up here “unto a land that He showed us.” But our roots are
growing deeper and deeper into this rich, rocky soil.
   Ever since we
moved up here three years ago, Doyle and I have been looking for just
the right house for us, keeping in mind that the time might come when
it was the right thing for everybody for Doyle’s mom, Ruby, to move in
with us.
   We’ve talked about living in the country. We’ve talked
about living in town. We’ve talked about building in the country. We’ve
talked about building in town. We’ve looked at houses. We’ve driven out
into the hills and dreamed. We’ve sketched out house plans.
   But none of these seemed just exactly right.
   I’m
the kind of person who operates from the heart rather than from the
head, and I’ve always told Doyle, “I think when the time is right,
we’ll just KNOW what to do. When our house comes along, we’ll know it
when we see it.”
   In order to understand the rest of this story from
my point of view, you need to know my background with houses. As a
little girl, I moved almost every year of my life, from Navy base to
Navy base. Most of the houses we lived in had nondescript wall-to-wall
carpet and popcorn ceilings and tiny bedrooms and flimsy doors.
   My
life’s other important houses were all old ones. My grandmother Poppy’s
house in Mississippi, built in the 1850s. My great-grandparents’ home
right on the beach in Gulfport, built in the late 1800s. My boys’
grandparents’ farmhouse in Mississippi, built right after the Civil
War. And then, the house that I loved (and sometimes hated) for almost
20 years, my very own old Mississippi house, the one I raised my boys
in. Probably begun in the mid-1800s and added onto throughout the
years, it had a wrap-around front porch and tall windows and high
ceilings and porcelain doorknobs and heart-pine floors and a huge
cast-iron, claw-foot tub (and drafts and no insulation and hardly any
closets ... but we loved it.)
   So when you say “Home” to me, I see a
big old white house with lots of steps up to the front porch. I can’t
help it. New houses, as beautiful as they can be, just don’t feel like
home to me.
   Every time we’ve driven by a tall old white house, my heart has yearned.
   Doyle’s
never been as in love with the idea of an old house as I have, being of
a more practical mindset when it comes to things like leaking faucets
and uneven floors and lack of insulation in attics.
   But a couple of
weeks ago, he was reading the classified page in the Sunday Times and
spotted an ad for an old home on South Maple Street. We looked it up
online, and recognized a house we’ve driven by many times and admired.
   Well,
we went to look at it, and something magical happened. It was just like
I had imagined. When we walked around the house and the yard, we just
knew. Doyle, too. And Ruby. This was meant to be our house. It was
whispering to us — just like Harrison had on our first visit almost
four years ago — “Welcome home.”
  Heart-pine floors. Porcelain
doorknobs. Tall, double-hung windows. A big old cast-iron bathtub.
Upstairs bedrooms with slanting walls. Interesting nooks and crannies.
A place for Doyle’s woodshop. A huge yard with big trees, a sunny spot
for a garden — and an Ozarks dogwood to bloom next to our side porch
next spring.
  We’ll be moving very soon to our very own little piece of our beloved Ozarks. Praise God from Whom all blessings flow!

By Celia DeWoody
Published Nov. 26, 2008, Harrison (Ark.)  Daily Times
Copyright 2008 CPI, Inc.

Hey, friends!
I'm ready to change this autumn color scheme over to Christmas!
I've been snowed under with a big project at work, and starting to pack to move into our new old house! We closed on Thursday, and will be moving in by the end of the first week in December. As it's only three blocks from where we currently live, we're moving things ourselves as we get them packed, and then will get some guys to help move the big stuff.
We're very excited. Doyle's mom, Ruby, is going to be moving with us. She'll be in a big downstairs bedroom and Doyle and I will be upstairs.
What a blessing! We have a lot to be grateful for this Thanksgiving.
What are you especially grateful for this week, my friends?