This year to celebrate the birthday of my half-sister's mother (my father's first wife; I'm still convinced that some language must have a one-word term for this), we have a two-person guest post! My sister and my nephew each wrote something about Mary Lou.
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On November 13, 1976, my mother became a first-time grandmother to my son, Joel, and my 4-year-old sister, Shanyn, became an aunt. Shortly after Joel’s birth, my parents moved to Virginia and then to Florida.
In the summer of 1983 Shanyn started spending part of the summer with us in Pennsylvania. A few years later, Joel started making the return trip with Shanyn and visited for a few weeks to a month in Florida.
It was great fun for Joel, but I was always worrying that they were getting into mischief at Grandma’s instigation!
Of course, as Joel got older the visits were not as frequent, but my mother would tell anyone who would listen how proud she was of Joel’s military service and that he had given her the new title of great-grandmother, with the births of his sons Zachary and Connor.
In observation of Mary Lou’s birthday on October 16, I asked Joel if he could write a Grandma memory.
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I remember getting up at the wee hours of the morning to go fishing. My grandmother, an insomniac, was already awake and vacuuming when the alarm went off. There were several steps in the fishing process, first stopping so she could fill up her massive cup of Diet Rite cola at the convenience store.
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| Sand flea (Talitrus saltator)
, by Arnold Paul / edit by Waugsberg - Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 2.5 |
Instead of buying bait, we would catch it. If we were fishing off of a pier then she had a cast net to grab some wayward mullet. Mission complete, I thought, we had caught some fish! If we were surf casting then she had a makeshift sand flea trap made from the remnants of an appropriated street sign and some chicken wire. The trap went into the sand as the surf retreated to catch the little crustaceans.
Not long after the sun came up we would be headed back to the house. There were always porpoises breaching in the intercoastal along the causeway. Grandma James would look at the red and white smoke stacks of the power plants as her daily vision check.
I wasn’t much for the fishy part, but I enjoyed the time with my grandmother, who never met a stranger. Oh, the stories!
— Joel Kent III
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Mary Lou (Bowen) Sellers James would have been 86 today.
Ah... The ever crazy fisher woman. I recall a day in Virginia going fishing with Mom. I couldn't have been more than about 8, so maybe 1980? We would hike about 1/2 mile on a trail along the creek. I carried the poles and mom had her lawn chair, a bucket and tackle boxes. There was one part of the trail that was blocked by a huge boulder, like 10 feet high. It was quite easy for an 8 year old but to watch Mom, at 300lbs navigate her way up it, cursing always made me laugh. We made it to her honey hole and was there about an hour when we heard thunder. We waited but could feel the change in the atmosphere and knew it was time to go. We packed up and started booking on that trail. The skies opened up and buckets of rain poured on us and the thunder and lightening was crashing all around. I never saw Mom make that boulder so fast. When we got back to the old beater car we looked at each other like drowned rats and just started laughing at each other. That was Mom. Always joking.
ReplyDeleteThank you for commenting, Shanyn! Now that I'm hearing about her interest in fishing, I guess her having the piranhas makes more sense.
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