I recently mentioned that my great aunt turned 100 years old in September.
It was amazing to see a numeral candle that had three numbers on it.
Truthfully, how many of us will ever get to see a day like that for ourselves?
The birthday celebration was especially exciting, because my Aunt Essie has a very strong mind and understood everything that was going on.
I mean, this woman to this day is following the Major League Baseball races and already predicting the winner of the 2005 World Series.
She will not let me divulge her prediction, however.
Can you imagine that? She is thinking clearly in 2005 – and she was born in 1905.
She is the eldest living member of our family. Heck, she remembers when my grandparents, my mother’s mom and dad, were dating each other.
And they were born in 1895!!! That is right, she remembers when they were dating in 1912. That was before my mother, who is the seventh child, was even thought of. That just gives me chills.
I love to sit next to her and hear all of her stories about growing up.
She told me how when she and her siblings would misbehave in church her mother would punish them.
Not by whipping them or making them do extra chores; there were always extra chores on their farm anyway.
They would be punished in a different way.
You see, on Sunday evenings after supper, they would all be able to take turns looking at the brand new Sears and Roebuck catalog. The pictures were beautiful and filled with items they had never seen before.
Well, for their punishment, they could not look at the catalog. Instead they had to sit across the small living room and listen to the other children “ohh and ahhh” over the pictures.
“It was torture, I tell you, just plain torture. That was all we had, the catalog and a radio, to tell us about the rest of the world – oh and, of course, our used schools book,” Aunt Essie told me.
When I think about those times, I realize how well we have it today in 2005.
When Aunt Essie was a girl there was …
No indoor plumbing at their house.
No electricity.
No automobile.
No washing machine.
No way a black child could go to school with a white child.
No microwave.
No shampoo (they used soap).
No refrigerator (they used an icebox, with a block of ice at the bottom).
They were without a lot of the modern conveniences that we take for granted today, but they had an abundance of what we need more of today.
LOVE!
That, the grace of Jesus, and a great sense of humor, Aunt Essie said, has kept her alive for 100 years and counting.
Thanks for sharing.