ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 17, 1995 TAG: 9512180115
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: NEW RIVER JOURNAL
SOURCE: ELIZABETH OBENSHAIN
Christmas swirls by us. The season no longer stretches out in endless and tantalizing days as it did in childhood - days spent absorbing holiday lights and sounds, days of wondering where my mother had mysteriously hidden our presents.
Finally, came those last exciting hours on Christmas Eve when we loaded the car and headed to the family gathering at Mill Creek.
As we pulled up to the white farmhouse, Aunt Lucy would meet us at the door. A Spartan country woman whose angular face had been weathered by years on the farm, she was for us the human embodiment of Christmas.
Despite her own sober garb, she would dress the Christmas tree in the parlor with so many lights, colored balls and silver icicles that it made the whole room a shimmering, magical place.
With the natural selfishness of children, we cousins thought of Aunt Lucy as being all ours. She seemed to exist to create for us Christmas gatherings where cousins, aunts, uncles and grandfather would cluster before the huge fireplaces to warm their backsides, talk, eat and just enjoy each other's presence.
We never thought of her own private world in that small community, a once rural crossroads in Botetourt County. Looking back, I realize now that she would have been only a few years older than I am now, an active woman in her early 50s, when I first remembered her. Yet in my childish self-absorption, I never thought of her as having an existence outside of her role as the center of our family.
Old photographs show a pretty young woman, sitting with her twin sister in their Gibson-girl frocks in a buckboard before setting off on a picnic. But even then her young shoulders carried a load of responsibility - raising and feeding a large family from the age of 12, when her mother died.
Kindness must have been bred in her bones. When my grandfather decreed that he would never turn a friend or a stranger away hungry from their door on heavily traveled U.S. 11, it was Lucy's hands that cooked the beans and baked the biscuits. Morning and night, she fed seven children, her father and assorted relatives and guests without the aid of a refrigerator or electric stove.
When her only brother, my father, drove a mail route with a horse and buggy, Lucy rose with him at 3:30 a.m. Her home-cooked breakfasts sustained him on winter mornings when prudence dictated that he walk part of his route to keep from dozing off and freezing in the buggy.
Years later, when I came on the scene, Lucy was still the kindly, no-nonsense boss at Mill Creek. The aroma spiraling up the back staircase of her coffee heating on the wood stove was her signature. We saw her tending the stove, the milk cows, toting logs to the huge fireplace. What we didn't see was how she tended to others in that community.
Before government safety nets and community charities, children's Christmases often depended on the kindness of neighbors. Lucy, in her quiet, brusque manner, was the Christmas messenger to several families in that small community.
I never knew of her other life until an older woman came up to me a year ago, at the funeral for one of Lucy's younger sisters.
The woman had grown up in a local family too poor to have a Christmas for herself and several brothers. Twenty years after Lucy's death, her kindness still lingered with this neighbor.
One bitter Christmas, the woman remembered, someone had teased her brother about whether Santa Claus would be able to find him through all the snow and ice.
"I don't know about Santa," he said doubtfully, "but Miss Lucy can."
LENGTH: Medium: 69 linesby CNB