Georgia Green Stamper – Georgia On Her Mind

His name popped up in my e-mail with uncanny timing. I was deep into planning the 80th reunion of The Rev. Silas A. Hudson’s descendants, and a few days earlier, I’d been to see “The Help,” a movie about racial prejudice encountered by black domestic workers circa 1963 Mississippi.  You see, Leon R. Harris (1886-1960) was a black writer who spent most of his childhood living in my white great-great-grandfather’s Kentucky home.  

The summer I was 10, “Death” showed up uninvited at our front door and refused to leave. It wasn’t that I had not been introduced to him before. Growing up on a farm, I learned what buzzards circling in the sky meant almost before I could talk. Something was always dying, a groundhog or wild rabbit, or a ewe leaving an orphaned lamb for me to raise as a pet on a bottle. And per custom of the time and place, I tagged along with my parents wherever they went, attending more funerals in my first decade than most people do in a lifetime.

I got caught in the tailwind of my old friend, Birthday, as he raced through another April. I admit that I lost my balance for an hour or two. “You’re old,” Birthday taunted as he flew past me on his way to outrun next year before I can blink.
“That’s not nice,” I shouted after him. “And besides, Old is the new New. Old, now that the Baby Boomers are on Medicare, is IN.”

Ernie and I will soon be married 44 years, and until last week I’d never seen him read a book of poetry. But I’d carefully placed Sherry Chandler’s “Weaving a New Eden” on the table by his TV chair so that he could at least glance at it to say he had.
Sherry has been our chum since school days at Owen County High, and I thought he was obliged to flip through it. He’d also helped her a little with some genealogy research a few years ago, and I thought he might enjoy seeing what she’d done with her Roots-Web digging.