Join 54 writers from around the world as they tell about the advice their mothers gave them in childhood and how it worked out (or didn't!) in their adult lives. Sad and silly, humorous and heroic, these are true-life, deeply-felt accounts of life's journey, seen from the perspective of some of the most thoughtful writers at work today. MY MAMA ALWAYS SAID is a perfect gift for Mother--or anybody who has one!
From the Inside Flap
OUR HERITAGE, OUR GIFT
I never knew my great-grandmother, Mary Hall, but I’m sure I would recognize her anywhere. She’s what my ancestors in the hills of southern West Virginia would call the "spittin’ image" of my mother. Or--more accurately--my mother looked the spittin’ image of her grandma. Funny, but when I comb my hair in the morning, I see those same cheekbones, that same mouth, that same stolid gaze.
Grandma Hall’s gray-green eyes showed up unexpectedly in my daughter. Time isolated those two—one from the other—but I believe they know and understand each other in some fundamental way. Perhaps a likeness of heart and spirit binds the generations as surely as any resemblance of face or form.
Great-grandmother Alice and great-grandpa Aaron were better known to the family as Toots and Flip. Flip worked from apprentice to master stone mason over his three score and ten, paying a high price for his vocation by limping painfully in his final years under the burden of a prominent hunchback. He plodded his patch in silent reflection, spitting vile-smelling tobacco in the paths of long-eared hounds and scampering field mice. From beneath his ragged, black felt hat, even blacker eyes peered out impassively above a bushy mustache stained golden, like his fingers.
Toots walked five miles to town for groceries and mail once a week—and five miles back—often through mud and ice too deep or slippery for a packhorse to negotiate. She tilled, sowed, and harvested two acres of ground with nothing but a pick and a hoe every year for her three score and ten and yet another score. With the vegetables she coaxed from fields of clay and shale, she fed three children, four grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren, and every neighbor for miles. One of those neighbors found her dead in her garden—hoe in hand—at the age of 93. It was August. The harvest fell to others for the first time that year.
Toots and Flip never said much, but their gnarled hands, callused with work, spoke volumes. Flip’s magnificent natural stone fireplaces still warm the homes of the wealthy in the town where I grew up. Toots left a mark less concrete but no
less permanent. They speak of her even today—that tiny, white-haired woman with a will of steel, equipped with honesty and determination in equal measure. The young listen and believe her a model to emulate. The bricks of example she laid stabilize the future as surely as Flip’s retaining walls shore up the land against rain, wind, and flood.
How rare and precious are the gifts we receive from the generations that precede us, and what gifts cherished and priceless they pass on through us. We know who we are because we know where we came from. We know how to look ahead to the future because we’ve learned how to look back at the past.
To those who have gone before and to those who will come after, I join with the authors in printing this book with hope and binding it with love. For that, after all, is our heritage.
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