For the last several days from time to time, I have thought how I would like to go visit Marcella. I wish I could. Remember her greetings when you would visit, her smiling, inviting you in, even when it was hard for her simply to be standing? Remember the blooming plants all across her front porch? Her house seemed like a happy place though life grew harder and harder for her. And can you remember her wide kitchen with the cabinets that Frank had built for her and the big window where not-quite-ripe tomatoes were sitting in a row for the morning sun?
How did she do it? Her home was always welcoming and sweet smelling even as her health declined. And most importantly, do you remember her listening with full focus as you talked with her?
Saturday morning when I told Alline that tomorrow would have been Marcella’s birthday, she said, “Marcella was a good person. She was a hard worker.” Then she remembered a little story. When Alline and Hollie and the kids lived over at “Aunt Ida’s place” (up toward Walltown), Frank and Marcella came over to help them plant corn. They were using a corn planter pulled by a horse. Their work wasn’t going well because the fertilizer was in such large, hard lumps; it wouldn’t pass through the chute of the corn planter to combine with the seed corn to be planted. Everybody was frustrated. Alline said it was Marcella who started breaking up the lumps of fertilizer with her hands. This was very hard work, but as Alline says, Marcella was a hard worker, and slowly the corn got planted.
I had an occasion to be traveling past Nicholasville, KY last evening. As we drove past, I thought of the time when Marcella and Frank had lived there when Frank was a student at U.K. David can remember a particular story that happened the first fall that Frank and Marcella lived there. Frank had told Mom and Dad in a letter that their Quonset hut did not have heat, and the weather was beginning to turn cold. From somewhere Dad and Mom found a sheet iron stove and the necessary pipes. Then they gathered some fire wood and somehow crammed all this into the car, along with David, and went up to Nicholasville to Frank and Marcella’s first little house on a street called, “Shawnee Drive”. (David has a good memory). The stove was installed, and Frank said gratefully, “This will do us for a while.”
If I think of Marcella when she was a young woman or a middle-aged or even a little older person, I can hardly think of her without remembering children around her…mostly her own children or her grandchildren or even others’ children, such as mine. One time when she and Frank lived at the Emerson place at the end of Williams Road, I visited them there. What a rewarding, happy day, it was for me. I am not sure of the particular circumstances, but I do remember that Frank and Marcella happen to be babysitting 5 of their grandchildren. There they were all over the floor. Five little grandchildren. A room full of adorable children. Every one. And on this day, would you believe it, all little girls! (They would have been just as adorable with the little boys there, too.) They were all toddlers or near toddlers or a little older than toddlers crawling or walking with uncertain steps or even running. All busy. All moving. All contented, it seemed. And Marcella was, I could tell, proud. As she called each child’s name, she would identify each parent, also. I felt as happy as the kids, watching them play on that day and visiting with Marcella and Frank.
I do very much miss Marcella just as I very much miss my brother Frank. But if I recall that happy day with the little ones playing about them, I can enjoy a warm memory. It’s a day I like to relive. I bet you have happy recollections, too.