| Notes |
- "Seeking the sun--She yearned for the light, then for rest" by Nancy Eastridge, Times guest columnist--The El Paso Times, Sunday, April 7, 1985
She loved the sunshine. The sunshine made her flowers bloom, her garden produce and her house seem happier. On all those gloomy days when clouds filled the sky, she would stand at a window or in an open doorway and say, 'If I could only see the sun!" It was almost a prayer with her, a prayer for the necessity of life.
Maybe, in addition to making her flowers bloom, the sunshine reminded her of other sunny days when she walked in the beauty of the mountain springtime and dreamed her long dreams.
She dreamed of faraway places. Geography was her favorite subject in school and as she read, she dreamed of going to all those different places. She would be a teacher, save her money, and visit them all. But reality took over. Her father, an Irishman by lineage and a frontiersman of sorts, did not "hold with book learnin'" for women. they needed to know only how to keep house, work hard, care for the children and meet the needs of a husband.
Family members offered her free room and board while she went to school, but he would not allow it. And so her formal education stopped with the elementary grades. That did not stop her learning or her dreams about sun-filled places she might see some day although the locale changed. She settled on Texas--not too far away--as a place she might visit She knew that the sun shone a lot in Texas and some of her father's kin had moved there earlier. Somehow, she would make it.
But that dream was lost too. One day she met a widower with a family of children. Immediately she said, there was a bond between them, and some time later she married him. Her dream of adventure in some faraway place was changed to that of making a new home somewhere in Kentucky.
She and her new family went by covered wagon from North Carolina through the mountain areas, past the beautiful bluegrass area of Kentucky, and finally settled on a piece of land in the hill country of the state where she lived the rest of her days.
She felt a kinship with all forms of life. She suffered with the plants that died in the heat of summer or froze in the cold of winter, with the small farm animals that lost a mother or were disabled in some way, and she identified with the birds that made their nests in summer but flew to sunnier places when the cold winds blew and the cloudy days came.
She loved the beautiful in nature, in her surroundings, and in language. She lovingly cared for a weeping willow sprout until it became one of the most graceful of many trees in the area and rivaled in beauty the roses and other flowers that she cherished.
With a needle and thread and with no pattern to guide her, she made beautiful embroideries to grace her beds and tables. She quoted from memory the poems from her schoolbooks, and from the papers an magazines that came into her home, she clipped each attempt at verse--whether poetry or doggerel--and put it in a cardboard box to read later and possibly to memorize. She must have quoted these poems to herself as she went about her unpoetic days.
She worked hard. From the beginning of her married life. She had a family to care for and she had none of the modern conveniences to help her. She did the housework, raised the garden, washed, ironed, patched, darned, knit socks, made clothes, loved and cared for her children, and worked in the fields along with her husband and the boys.
She suffered much, both physically and emotionally. Spinal problems when she was a child left one shoulder higher than the other. A condition that worsened with the years and the work. She often worked when she was ill, for there was no time to pamper herself with rest in bed. She conceived 11 children, seven of whom died in infancy.
She was often unappreciated by her husband who ranted at her over minute things which he considered her failures. She saw him make what she considered mistakes in the way he disciplined the children, but because he was "the head" of the house, she could do nothing about it. She felt the pain of separation when her children left home, for the pain she felt in being separated from her own father and mother and family members never had left her. And her pillow was often wet with tears.
She was deeply religious. She read the Bible daily and prayed often. She was one of the shouting Methodists and often her voice was raised in shouts extolling her love, faith and belief in a loving God. Her dream of finding sunlit places in this world turned to the dream of leaving this world of pain and suffering and finding heaven and the sunlight of her Savior's love.
Throughout her life, she loved and looked for sunshine. But in this world, she found little of it. A little time after her 80th birthday, she quietly left off living as we do and went to further her search in another realm. She was sure she would find a world of sunlight there.
Nancy Eastridge, a retired teacher and former Peace Corps volunteer, has written articles for El Paso publications.
Newspaper article courtesy of Ruth A. Collins, Find A Grave #49164731
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1874 - 1955 (80 years)
