The Whole World Sings Below

The Whole World Sings Below

This evening, the dog and I hiked the ridge. It could have been the moors in a 19th century novel - an evening when it might be thundering, but is simply grey with racing clouds. The cows let us pick daisies, red clover - Dad's favorite and I think of him. A kind soul who took loving care of the Japanese during the Occupation - a mere blink of an eye of time from when his brother, a fighter pilot, an architect, a father, was lost in the South Pacific.

I got to be with my dad when he took his last breath in the room he had shared with my mother as long as I had known him. I stood there with my knee on his bed, touching his back, merging with Greenbrier, K, Araceli, and Thom as we attempted to sing our father into heaven with the only thing we could muster in our numbness: “Oh, the West Virginia Hills, how majestic and how grand, with their summits bathed in glory…..”.

The last words my father spoke, just hours before he died as he struggled from the bath room were: “Beth, Beth, help me, dear.” How many times in his life did he hear similar words uttered to him as he made his rounds at the hospital, visited the sick and dying in their homes - or echoing in his head as he thought of his younger brother in the fighter plane, being shot down and drowned in the South Pacific? That generation didn’t talk about hauntings in their heads.

What is it about human nature that in the moments it takes the pen to scratch a President’s name, an Emperor’s signature, a Prime Minister’s scrawl, a soldier goes from battle to reconstruction? Even as the heart screams with grief for the kid brother who shared the attic room with the slanted ceilings in a little New Jersey town, a man is capable of walking into a hospital ward in that prior land called evil, and seeing a woman with pneumonia, a child with a broken leg, a young man with seizures, and he begins to administer care with every fiber of his knowledge and every inch of his soul. And then he writes home letters to his wife, extolling the gentleness of these people. That generation didn’t reveal how they discovered the secret of forgiveness, the ability to be humble and in that humbleness become the strongest generation yet.

As my father’s breaths became softer and slower, I wanted to whisper to him, “Go Daddy – reach on over for Mother’s hand and embrace your brother and all the collies who have gone before you and I know are waiting for you. Indulge in the gardens of your beloved sweetest berries.” Instead I softly began to sing with my siblings, “I want to wake up in the morning where the rhododendrons grow, where the Lord is so near me, when I breathe He can hear me, and the whole world sings below…”

Back in 1907, Miss Anna Jarvis, a woman who was never to become a mother herself, held the first Mother's Day service as a memorial to her mother, in Grafton, West Virginia. Decades later, she announced to the world that she wished she'd never started the tradition. What began as an honoring of mothers became a commerical holiday and this saddened her. But the holiday became popular and continues to be celebrated throughout the world. Frankly, I'm glad. Though it brings a pain to the heart as I reach for a white carnation instead of a red one at the door of our beautiful rock church along the Blue Ridge Parkway, the memory of my own mother is clearly one to celebrate. And there is the recollection of so many women who touched my life in a motherly way as I grew up in a small town in central West Virginia.

My mother, Lois Ruth, was a kind and gentle soul, though strong in so many ways. When I am asked to describe her, I often say three things: A Methodist, a botanist, a 4-H'er. Her creed in life could be summed up in one sentence, if one can actually do that for someone as personal as a mother. I will try. My mother hated alcohol, thought God cried when the mountains were stripped for coal and the trillums and topsoil and bubbling creeks were pushed asunder -- and she was always pushing herself and her children to 'make the best better'.

There were so many strong and resourceful women in that little town. My earliest memories of Saturday night family gatherings bring to mind Ella Berisford, Irma St. Clair, Hazel Beer. Aren't those wonderful names? Ella, Irma, Hazel - names from another era; ladies who loved their children and spread that love to their friends' children, too.

And the neighborhood mothers of Victoria Hill. They kept their eyes on all of us, but in an independent way that encouraged our all day hikes and building of forts and softball games and tree house construction. Knowing when to bring out the watermelons and gather all the gang around first one house and the next week another. I salute them -- Alice Williams, Rose Lockwood, Lena Stansbury, Martha Daniel, Splash Williams, Mona Oldaker, Vivian Shaffer, Sarah Chamberlain, and Martha Shissler. They made childhood sweet.

Those first few years of school, our teachers were often like mothers to us. Helen Reger was an angel on this earth. Martha Jane Phillips gave me a lifelong love of reading. Olive Baxa can still make me smile when I think of her laugh. Katherine Steurer had the prettiest sweaters I had ever seen. Delma Iden read us "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and is the only teacher who ever gave me straight A's - an act of pure love for that A-- in handwriting and even as a nine year old, I knew that. I thank Edith Hall in my mind every time I have to multiply a number. Mary Rinard had the patience of a saint. Betty Hicks taught me respect for myself. And Hope Butterfield was a teacher who let us come to her house on a Saturday and become her friend. But she also made me sing the only solo I have ever sung in my life.

As time went on, my best friends' mothers rose to the occasion and reached out to us at times when we needed someone other than our own mothers. There were the mothers who were actually fun and would take us shopping and join in our card games and show a real interest in our boy worries and other angsts: Peg Clark, Jane Reddecliff, Sue Martin, Susie Miller, Pat Turner. And those who would talk to us with respect, like Bunny Mow and Anna Thompson. And mothers who treated us with politeness and interest and concer - Judy Allman's mom and Susan Hunnicutt's mother. And then there was Maxine Hinkle, who let us take over her house on Saturday afternoons so a gang of us could laugh and dance and make bologna and potato chip sandwiches and just be girls. And I could salute more, but as the decades have passed, the memories and the names become fuzzier, but remain warm.

My last salute is to my Godmother, Beth Darnell. A woman with natural class and grace who lived in what I thought of as the grandest house in town, a columned home on Meade Street. We shared a name and a friendship between a young girl and an older woman. She gave me gifts each year on my birthday and Christmas. It would be her gift I would reach for each Christmas Eve when we returned home from church and mother would let us open one gift before bed. I always knew it would be something I would cherish. To this day, I sometimes reach far into my jewelry box and pull out the sterling silver figure of a young woman, engraved with the name of Beth, and I hold it close and conjur up the times of childhood. A time when there were so many mothers in my life.