Mo’s Long Life

“You left that

out.” Few things please me as much as hearing from someone who takes up a story where I left off or takes me to task when I get something wrong.

“Mo” used post cards to scribble a few lines. When she got wired up, the writing got smaller and squiggly. I usually got the gist.

At a “ripe age,” she has taken up writing e-mails with help from a great-grandson.

Minna, known by her nickname “Mo,” was born in the community of Juniper in west Georgia, but her daddy was able to rent a farm in nearby Schley County, so they moved there.

She and her family lived “mostly out of town,” but she said she woke up one morning and discovered she was in a subdivision.

People complained of her roosters crowing. “Roosters are gonna crow unless you can slip sunrise past them.”

“In that time,” she began, “when the gal was too young to marry, some boy would lure her away from home. It was called ‘stealing a bride.’” “The two probably knew each other from school or church or maybe just in the neighborhood. They’d meet up somewhere, usually at night and go off to a relative’s house.”

There was a boy who kept hanging around, asking her daddy if he could help him on the farm. “He was a good hand but didn’t have his own place. He was just sixteen.”

Finally, when she was fourteen her daddy let the two “jump a broom.”

Mo described broom jumping as an unofficial marriage but says now folks don’t bother with the broom nor the jumping.

She reminded me that feather beds and pillows had to be cleaned by beating the dust out of them and laying them out in the sun to be sanitized by the sunlight. “You left that out,” she wrote.

Mo is long past her ninetieth birthday and credits long life to a diet of home grown veggies and chickens.

Mo’s daughter persuaded her to move in with her, but now she takes care of her daughter.

“When you turn ninety, folks assume you can’t do anything anymore, but now I’m taking care of “SueSue.”

Mo never learned to drive. If she needed to go somewhere, she walked and if it was too far, she probably didn’t need to go there anyway. Her words.

“The grands all drive but they’re just babies and they scare me.”

joenphillips@yahoo.com