This was beloved columnist Celestine Sibley's final Thanksgiving column, originally published in Nov. 27, 1998.
My family always regarded Thanksgiving week as my mother Muv's birthday. Sometimes the holiday fell on her birthday, sometimes it didn't.
We didn't tell her, but we regarded the fact that she was born as the ultimate reason for thanksgiving, no matter whether the anniversary came on some day in the week besides Thursday. She would have hooted at the idea. She certainly didn't think she was anything to celebrate. In fact, she was more aware of her limitations than anybody we knew.
Nevertheless, we knew what we had in her, and it was reason for celebration, even if it had been a pokey year with the meter man regularly coming to turn off the gas or the electricity and holes in everybody's shoes. Wherever Muv was in our lives was a richness. We knew it then, and we still know it.
The marvel to all of us is that she no longer comes when we call her. She was always where we needed her. A headstone we bought in Cottondale for her grave is sinking in the soft sandy earth, looking a little catawhankers now, but it tells us she died 20 years ago --- and we have to believe it. But doesn't her laughter, her scorn, her outrageous advice sound in our lives every day? Face to face with our own limitations, aren't we reminded of her wonderful, stubborn never-say-die bravery?
She was born on Nov. 24, 1892, in a tall white house on one of the main streets of Pearson, Ga. Her mother, a capricious 16-year-old redhead, took her and went back to the farm in Berrien County, tired of the marriage and through with her baby's father. From then on, life for the little girl was a peculiar adventure. She had good grandparents, but they didn't last. She had many cousins and aunts, and she always knew she had a bed and a meal with them. But it wasn't easy traveling from place to place in South Georgia and northwest Florida, trying always to earn her keep where she went.
The redeeming feature was that she was alive --- and she loved living. She sang. She joined a stock company and acted in plays. She taught herself to read and write and to play the piano. When she was an old woman, she packed her health shoes and her voile dresses and went back to school --- to Florida State University, which she had always admired. She taught school, and the man who sold us that tottering tombstone said he was in her class at Alford school and she was the best teacher he ever had.
She scorned ignorance and laziness. When she got a letter from a former beau with grammatical errors in it, she was filled with contempt. Nobody, she said, had to be ignorant. Nobody has to be a sorry, good-for-nothing-sit-around-and-do-nothing. She loved poetry and tried her hand at writing it, earning $25 once from Good Housekeeping magazine for a short verse. She had a monumental respect for books, and even when she was terrified of driving in downtown Mobile's traffic, she would take me into the library once a week and load our Model T with things to read.
Sometimes I wonder about her religion. She was a church member, all right, but the appearance of piety never rested on her. She criticized the preacher and talked about her neighbors when she felt they were erring and deserved it. But I never doubted that she believed most of all in that passage in the Bible that says "the greatest of these is charity." Whatever she had she shared.
She made fun of herself and she made fun of us. If we lapsed into self-pity over something, she would jeer, "Aren't you a pretty looking thing? Wash your face and show some sense, if you've got any!" And if things were bad, as they sometimes were, she would make us take a walk and she would dredge up old stories from the past when lack of money and disgraceful behavior hit the family, but they rallied and waded through.
Sometimes we rail out at life for taking her from us. Lesser mortals live and flourish. Why couldn't she? But during Thanksgiving week, when we talk about what my children used to call our "thankfuls, " we talk of her and are thankful that we had her.
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