Like a puff of vapor on a winter day, the feeling lingered but a moment.
An odor wafting through the air–frying bacon perhaps–arrested Mary and me, even though we had just come from a restaurant teeming with such aromas. "That smell takes me back to Mama's house on Elm Street in Crossett," Mary remarked. She was living with Gladys and Thurston Daniel, her grandparents, when we married.
The impact on me was remarkably similar: the same smell instantly swished me back 40 years and sat me at the kitchen table with my grandmother, Sarah Norrell Tyson. From time to time my mind transports me there to again savor the "farm hand" breakfast she has lovingly prepared.
I am young, and she is old… but still able to live alone in the small house on South Kentucky Street in Crossett. It's a warm summer morning, and I have wrestled my lawnmower up the alley to cut her grass. It doesn't take long, but she offers to pay me. I refuse, of course, with assurances that breakfast will be payment enough.
She knows the routine. I want only toast, bacon and orange juice, and she has already had someone take her shopping. She repeatedly offers me eggs, but I assure her that the pound of bacon and dozen pieces of toast filling the platter will be plenty. She only nibbles, and I am blissfully ignorant of cholesterol.
She tasted lean times on a farm, single-handedly rearing six children through the Great Depression after her husband died. So she naturally worries that I will go away hungry. And she asks how I'm getting along in college and encourages me to do my best.
My earliest recollections of her harken back to her tenure as a housemother at what was then Arkansas A&M College in Monticello. Her children and grandchildren always shared Christmas dinner in her apartment in Wells Hall, one of the men's dorms. But she would faithfully include young men like Mohamed "Mo" Najab who had no place to go for Christmas. They were "her boys," her extended family. They loved her.
A humble woman, we thought her a bit old-fashioned. And as was characteristic of her generation, she was diligent in her work. Though her brother was the Honorable William F. Norrell, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 25 years, she never spent his far-reaching influence to buy special favors for herself. To us he was simply Uncle Willie Frank.
Failing health gradually robbed her of strength, dignity and mental alertness–as her little grandsons grew into the men who would be her pallbearers. All endowed with her good name and a heritage worth remembering, her children and grandchildren comprised a final and fitting legacy.
Memories are the threads that stitch together little scraps of forgotten years. And I am glad to have secured this fragment for yet another day.
Copyright 2002 James McAlister
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