Precious Memories ...

It’s been the Year of Funerals, it has. Headed for another today, a cousin, Rodgers Harris the son of my Sainted Mother’s brother Ed Harris. Uncle Ed was an awfully good man whose first wife, Ethel, died young. I don’t remember her too well. He had two others, wives that is. Outlived them both.

I do remember staying with Uncle Ed and Aunt Ethel one day on their farm in Cleveland County. I was maybe four or five. She took me walking down to their pond, where Rodgers, his brother Kenneth, and a bunch of other teen-aged boys were swimming.

That wasn’t odd. What was odd was than not a one of them wore a stitch of clothes. They were enjoying themselves so much that they completely ignored Aunt Ethel, and she them. I just gawked, not for the last time in my life.

I knew Rodgers afterwards from visits and funerals. He and his wife Eloise would show for gatherings or stop at our store. I never heard a bad word about either. They were just a couple who married and had kids and grew old between visits and funerals. You never thought of them as a couple as much as a single entity named RodgersandEoise.  Lower Arkansas (LA) is full of such folks.

Here’s an odd story about his parents. It involves the mother of our clan, Grandmother Vicie Coats Harris, the mother of eight. Her husband, Sainted Mother’s father, died when SM was three, the baby of the family. The only thing she remembered about him was when the oldest son, Holland Harris shimmied up a pole to ring a bell letting the community know something bad had happened.

It left Grandma Harris with two young girls still at home, alone and destitute, relying on friends, relatives, and pennies picked up from washing clothes for sustenance. When the local church acquired new curtains, she begged them for the old and made underclothes for my mother from them. It might even make an arch-conservative moist up to have heard how the children laughed when she fell at school and revealed her shame. Poor wasn’t the word for it. There were no safety nets then, a libertarian’s paradise.

Back to Uncle Ed and Aunt Ethel. They had married and were eking a living from the harsh land. She was the daughter of a widower, Fletcher Rodgers, the father of, if I remember right, 13 children, a number of them still living at home at the time. This must have spawned an idea on someone’s part, for soon, Ed and Ethel were delivering messages between widower and widow.

One can guess the result. We had cousins and step-cousins all over LA as we grew up. Rodgers and Eloise, as a couple, represented both. Someone told the story once of how a relative carried Sainted Mother and her sister Essie from the wedding to their new home in an automobile, maybe their first ride in one, ever. The person telling it recalled how Mother was grinning at folks from the car window as if she new that the days of hunger were over.

I’ll go down into the Fatherland today to say goodbye to Rodgers. I’ll pass near to the cemetery where Grandpa Harris lies, near to the grave of his father, George W. Harris of the First Indiana Cavalry, U.S.A and the father of his wife, William Coats, 26^th Arkansas Infantry, C.S.A.

Yep, it’s always been a mixed-up sort of family. The woods down in LA have always been full of them. Most were fine American citizens like Rodgers Harris, a veteran of the United States Air Force. You know, you first lose your grandparents. Then you lose your parents. Then there are the aunts and uncles. But when the cousins start to go, you begin to think seriously about this mortality thing.

So long George Rodgers Harris.
I wish I had known you better.