Mother

My mother, Anna Margie Stoner, was forty when I was born, and Daddy turned forty-two soon after.  If it hadn’t been for my brother, six years my elder, I would have experienced the older-parent, only-child syndrome, because my two sisters had already married before I was old enough to remember anything.

I do recall a lot about Mother, memories primarily related to the fifteen years we lived in Alabama.  For her and Daddy it was a second career adventure under God’s leading.  For me it was normal growing-up time.  Both my parents were nearing fifty years of age in 1951 when we moved to Alabama, and looking back I marvel at how they enjoyed life and accomplished much during those years.

Mother was a doer.  She believed that dirt was incompatible with her Christian convictions.  She worked very hard to keep our home neat and clean.  The men in our family had to be very careful not to drag dirt into the house on their work shoes.  Periodically Mother waxed the linoleum kitchen floor.  Sometimes just after she did this, I did something I considered to be a great sport.  I would coax our husky farm dog, Mack, into the house via the back door when Mother wasn’t looking.  Then I would place his paws on the edge of the slick kitchen floor and give him a firm shove across the linoleum to the other door.  The old mutt knew what was coming but usually consented meekly to playing my game, bracing his legs awkwardly in a half-crouching position as he glided swiftly along, mostly on his toe nails.  He didn’t bark, whine, or bite; he only displayed a worried look on his face until gladly regaining his freedom as he hit the screen door and bounded outside!

Gardening was a family project, but after the produce was gathered, Mother had the greatest share of the work.  She did some canning but mostly froze the corn, beans and other vegetables.  We had brought a twenty cubic foot chest freezer along from Pennsylvania so we could stock up with food to carry us through the fall and winter.  Fall was butchering time and this also added to our food storage.  Some of the broilers from our chicken raising operation always found their way into the freezer too after each flock went to market.  Mother taught me how to kill and dress poultry.  I always thought a more fitting term would be to undress the chickens as I learned how to behead, scald, and pluck those birds!

One of my mother’s gifts was to offer warm hospitality.  Young and old and many between enjoyed her culinary creations.  Relatives and friends would come occasionally from Pennsylvania.  Preachers and missionaries who visited our country church always seemed to end up around our table sooner or later.  Mother’s barbecued chicken was my favorite, I think, despite the fact that I spent a great deal of time and effort hand feeding thousands of chickens during those years.

My college roommate, Chan P, made an instant hit with Mother when he came to visit for the first time. He gave her hugs and bragged on her cooking, including her special iced coffee brew.   Chan had been quite a pagan before his dramatic Christian conversion at twenty-one.  Apparently he found something in my home that he’d missed in his own, and delighted to come home with me for visits.  I liked the arrangement, too, because Chan had a 1957 Chevy with a racing cam that seemed to speed up significantly as we drove the last few of the 220 miles from Birmingham for a weekend visit. 

Mother hummed or sang as she washed dishes and hung out the laundry.  She ordered religious books from Moody Press for distribution among a number of families in the community.  She was a Sunday school and summer Bible school teacher, thoroughly knowledgeable of the Gospel, Bible stories, and how it all related to herself and others.  I still recall a series of flannel graph lessons she taught us youngsters about time and clocks.  Missionary friends with Overseas Missionary Fellowship, now OMF, helped Mother sponsor a regular prayer group for mission work in the Far East.  Later this led to regular attendance for her and Daddy at a regional OMF prayer conference held in Georgia.

Mother had one small innocent vice that she passed on to me.  When driving the ten miles back from grocery shopping in town, neither she nor I could resist opening a loaf of ‘light’ bread.  That’s what it’s called in Alabama, and we enjoyed a piece or two of the soft, delicious stuff as a kind of appetizer before the approaching supper hour!

Once Mother’s back gave her trouble, causing her to be bedridden with traction attached to her legs for some days.  The most serious health condition she faced during those fifteen years was the time she swallowed part of her dental bridge work while eating toast one morning.  An x-ray showed that the piece had lodged in her colon, fortunately removed by major surgery some days later.  I don’t recall if she was able to reuse the item or had to get some new bridge work!

It was during the Alabama years that Mother took up fishing at her doctor’s suggestion.  Daddy, Mother and I would drive 60 miles to Milton, Florida for an afternoon and evening of fishing enjoyment.  We didn’t always catch lots of fish but certainly were contented observers of God’s creation.  Mother took her fishing seriously, even praying for a good catch, but always able to chuckle and attribute whatever the outcome was, to a satisfying combination of the Lord’s doing, along with her best fishing efforts. 

Mother lived to see all but one of her grandchildren.  The last one was our son, Mark, whom she knew about, prayed for and keenly anticipated meeting at our next furlough from Brazil.  But the Lord took Mother to heaven before that, after two years of diminishing strength and suffering from cancer.  She and Daddy had moved back to Pennsylvania for retirement, and that’s where her seventy-six years of earthly pilgrimage drew to a close. 

Earlier she and Daddy had visited us in Brazil in 1973, soon after their fiftieth wedding anniversary.  Their three-month visit was drawing to a close when Mother wrote the following in her diary one day after shopping and preparing to return home to the States:  “It was a very good day!”   Her life could be summarized similarly:  It was a very good life.

Charles Stoner
First written in 1993
Revised, May, 2012