Friday, March 18, 2011

TOP STORY > >Remembering Mother

By JOAN McCOY
Leader staff writer

As more and more women entered the workforce about 40 years ago, Revlon came out with a commercial for its Enjoli perfume that set a standard most of us have found impossible to meet.

“I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan and never let you forget you’re a man,” a thin woman wearing a slinky evening dress belted out while holding up a skillet to illustrate her point.

In hindsight, I can see that my mother, Carrie Baker, came as close as anyone to meeting the lofty goal set by that commercial.

She didn’t bring home the bacon. She butchered it, salted it and sliced it and even made the skins into pork rinds. In her almost 84 years, she never held a paying job and yet she contributed more to the support of the family than if she had brought home a paycheck. She raised food for the family in a garden so big that other people would have called it a truck patch. She sewed every dress I had until I learned to sew myself in high school. And I wasn’t the only girl she sewed for. My family had seven girls and five boys who wore a few homemade shirts when they were young.

And at the end of some of her shorter days, it was not uncommon for her to bathe and put on a clean dress before my dad came home from the field.

She died at the hospital in Stuttgart on Sunday evening after an apparent stroke on Friday. By that time, she had been in a nursing home for almost two years. The doctors said her dementia made her “pleasantly confused,” which apparently is a medical term for what happens when your mind goes to a happier place than where your body is.

Although her muscles were still strong from years of hard physical labor, she could no longer turn over in bed or even feed herself. But in her mind she was living in a little house on Big Creek in Lee County with her farmer husband and the first few of the 12 babies she would eventually have.

At the hospital, I listened to the stories my brothers and sisters told as we waited for the inevitable. And those were the stories that came to mind when my cousin, who writes obituaries for Bob Neal and Sons Funeral Home, called Tuesday to say she needed more for Mother’s obituary than that she was a homemaker who loved to embroider and raise flowers.

“I know there’s more to her than that,” my cousin said. “What about those cathead biscuits?”

It was odd to be on the receiving end of a call like that. I’m usually the one calling in search of the perfect anecdote to show that someone who just died is worth remembering, maybe even worth crying for.

But my mother didn’t want tears. In a letter to my sister Paula Holcomb that she wrote before her mind went, she called her funeral “her party.” Her only requests were that she be buried with the program from my dad’s funeral that had been the bookmark for her Bible since he died in 1999.

The music for the service had to include “Go Rest High on that Mountain,” “I Can Only Imagine” and “I Want to Stroll Over Heaven with You.”

“Everything else is up to y’all,” she wrote, then threw in, “Don’t let them put makeup on me.”

Near that same time, she told my sister Mary Hastings that she was getting tired. “Life has lost its flavor,” she said.

Her days had gotten monotonous and small wonder, considering what they had been.

We buried her on Wednesday beside my dad in the family cemetery on a little hill beside one of her old garden spots.

On Tuesday night, my sister Naomi Wallis wrote these words for my brother-in-law Mike Holcomb to read during her funeral.

“It was the spring of 1970, and I was a freshman at T.A Futrell Jr. High. I was skinny and had wild curly hair and was definitely not one of the popular girls. Unfortunately, my Home Ec project was due and Mother knew my dark secret. I couldn’t sew worth a flip.

“So she decided to make my dress for me. Now, no mother with seven daughters wants any of them to wear a mini dress, but Mother knew that’s what I wanted, so she made it. It was a hot pink A-line, with a ruffle down the front and so short, I had to hold it down when I walked up the stairs. When I put it on, I felt ‘cool.’ When I got back home, Mother said, ‘What did we get?’ I told her it was a B-plus, because the teacher said the zipper was old fashioned.

“Mother was thrilled and oddly enough now that I have to buy my dresses, they all have zippers like Mother made. In one day, my mother gave me a mini dress, a B-plus and self confidence. Not a bad day’s work for a mom.

“When I was sick, she rubbed my head with her tired hands until I fell asleep. To this day, it’s not safe to touch my head. She had us stand on notebook paper, and she would draw our feet and send them to Alden’s catalogue to make sure our shoes fit. At night when we were asleep, she cleaned the mud off those shoes and put them by the fire, so they would be warm in the morning.

“She would tell us an old elf, named Aiken Drum, did it. She got thorns, glass and even nails out of our feet, because we ran around barefoot. She put merthiolate on our cuts and then used the merthiolate to draw a cat above it.

“On cold mornings, she made us cocoa for breakfast and had fried chocolate pies waiting for us after school. She hated making fried pies because the chocolate melted into the grease and popped her, but she did it anyway.

“When I married, she made my wedding gown and was there when I had my babies. Before my son was born, I asked her, ‘Does it hurt?’ She said, ‘Yes, it does.’ Guess she was just keepin’ it real. When the years passed, if I was sad and cried, she cried. She loved me when I was less than lovable. More importantly, she prayed for me and I heard her sing about Jesus my whole life.

“Mother didn’t just work from sunup to sundown. That would have been a short day for her. She got up before daylight and started the fire in an old wood stove. She worked in the fields and cleared the new ground. She raised a garden that was literally a truck patch and canned food for the winter into the night.

“She was known to plow the garden with an old mule named Blue and later with a less-than-intelligent horse named Cricket. She washed our clothes on a ringer washer and cooked three full meals every day.

“It would take at least six men to butcher a hog, but Mother would cut it up and put it in the freezer by herself. In her ‘spare’ time she raised incredible flowers and embroidered. She read her Bible every day.

“She fried us chicken and made us a cake on our birthday, but she wasn’t a woman to be trifled with. She told us girls once that if we didn’t clean our room, she would nail the door shut. We didn’t. When we came home from school, we had to crawl through the window and then we cleaned our room.

“Somewhere at home, there’s a box with her memories. There are baby curls and an occasional baby tooth in envelopes with faded names written in pencil. There are cards, school awards, letters from Vietnam, pressed flowers and pictures drawn by grandchildren.

“But Carrie Baker was more than a mother, she was a woman of strength and stamina and she was loved. She was gracious, giving and gentle and the epitome of a strong Southern woman. Her passing is the end of an era.”

Carrie Belle Hudson Baker was born near Moro on March 28, 1927 and died March 13. She was preceded in death by her parents, Ollie Wheeler Hudson Poe and Calvin Hudson, her husband of 58 years, John Lee Baker, her sons, David and Marcus Baker and granddaughter, Carrie Hendrix Simpson.

She is survived by three sons and seven daughters, John S. Baker and his wife Carole of New Salem; Philip Baker and his wife Jackie of Holly Springs, Miss.; Shane Baker and his wife Leigh Ann of Moro; Betty Hendrix and her husband Ray of Rose Bud; Louise Best of Moro; Mary Hastings and her husband Don of Moro, Joan McCoy and her husband James of Beebe; Naomi Wallis and her husband Farrell of Beebe; Ruth Baker of Beebe, and Paula Holcomb and her husband Mike of Moro.

She also is survived by two brothers and three sisters, J. Lee Hudson of Moro; William Poe and his wife Barbara of Judsonia; Cora Neal and her husband Harold of Wynne; Flora Grady and her husband Buddy of Moro, and Connie Riggins and her husband Frank of Oakland, Tenn.

She had 26 grandchildren, 45 great-grandchildren and 12 great-great-grandchildren.