Georgia Green Stamper – Georgia On Her Mind

Each person who tells the story changes some detail as though we were archiving various versions of an Appalachian ballad. Sometimes they add a bit information I do not know, shared with them by a relative long dead. More often, they confuse the location, placing it here, then there, on the wrong farms, in the wrong county. They’re hazy about the names of the players. All but hers. Calla Lily Hudson.

When I opened my email account on Mother’s Day morning, I was surprised to find a “holiday greeting” from, of all people, the search engine at Ancestry.com. I’ve pictured him as a C-3PO sort of robot hunkered in a lonely basement alcove of the National Archives who earnestly tries to answer my requests for old census records and land deeds. Previously he had displayed no sense of humor. Now, out of the blue, he wanted to share “fun facts” about the mothers in my family tree.

If I were naming a holiday for an animal, I might go with Giraffe Day. They’re elegant beasts, and I’ve felt a kinship with them since I was in high school. That’s when Tony Denny observed to everyone in earshot that I had a neck as long as a giraffe’s.

Or Zebra Day – is there a more beautiful creature than a zebra? If it had its own day, might it become a symbol of racial harmony or world peace?

Veterans Day – formerly known as Armistice Day until we realized peace would ever elude us – seems a good time to tell my Great-Uncle Murf’s story.
This November day of observance first began to honor the veterans of his war, World War I.  And he was the archetypal American soldier. A Kentucky farm boy who’d never been more than a 100 miles from home, drafted but willing and patriotic, he did his duty without glory, without complaint.