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
