Lingering Jim Crow

My great grandmother Coyle (nee Seabolt) died ten days after Grandma was born and a black woman became Grandma’s nurse maid – her name long forgotten. Being from the south, in “Jim Crow” times, grandma apparently grieved at the way she personally treated this black woman who’d breastfed her. It seems the nursemaid was an ongoing presence in Grandma’s life after she was weaned. When Pop went back to Kentucky to visit Grandma’s family in the early sixties, several years after Grandma died, he took a picture of this forgotten old woman who remembered him as “Miz Belle’s husband”. From the stories told and from the nature some of her children inherited, my grandmother must have been very tender hearted. In a time when people ridiculed “niggers” with no second thought, Grandma Oldham stands out to me as a force of conscience in a shameful period for America and both sides of my family.

Neither the Douglass nor the Oldham families were vicious, mean spirited nor did they bear ill will regarding race matters. But the subtle, underlying reality is that subconscious attitudes existed. Typical of the time and place, my family’s views of other people were southern. The examples below, for the most part reflect attitudes as I remember them in the 1950’s and 1960’s and I simply point out that many years have passed as such tendencies were slowly expunged.
“Jim Crow” is the subject of a song caricaturing the southern American Black after the Civil War in which the catch phrase is “I weel around and jump Jim Crow”. A happy smiling, joking clowning black man was the stereotype and that behavior was intended to calm the underlying white terror of retribution from a freed black population. While intended to mitigate, being a phony act for the most part, it actually masked and perpetuated contemptuous white violence toward the black man, confiscation of his property, and effective disenfranchisement by denying education and access to vote. This period came to be labeled “The Jim Crow Era” and continued with routine hangings and contrived abuse (laws were passed and now referred to as “Jim Crow” laws) until after World War I or much later in some areas. One white woman reported being inadvertently bumped by a black man. She was astonished at his look of terror over this “hanging crime” and his frantic attempts to escape the situation. So this era and area shaped both sides of my family. It may be distasteful to discuss, but it’s a component of both Douglass and Oldham heritages and it was engrained in the community and culture at large. Nancy do I footnote any of this?
“Pop”, my granddad, was a foreman on a share cropper farm in near Ennis, Texas. Once in the black quarters, quite apart from the home grandma and grandpa lived in, a ruckus occurred. A black woman screamed and cried for a long time. “They’ll kill you”, grandma was quoted as saying when she prevented Pop from going to the blacks’ quarters “to see what all the carrying on was about”.
Clayton, our county seat, had a lone black cowboy known as “Nigger Bill” as a resident. In the late thirties and forties, signs are reported to have been posted in towns along the Burlington Northern Railroad which ran through Northwest Texas, our part of New Mexico and into Colorado which read, “Niggers, don’t let the sun set on you in this town.” Other words in the community were “nigger shooters”, “nigger toes”, and the like.
The attitude in the community extended to some degree towards the Mexican/American population. As shameful as it was and is, subtle bigotry existed. The tale is told in northeastern New Mexico of the notorious train robber, Blackjack Ketchum, and his gang that saw a Mexican riding off in the distance. Blackjack pulled out a gun and shot him. This thug was so heavy that when they hung him for robbing trains, a vey well attended public event in Clayton, an improperly placed noose and rope popped off his head when he dropped through the trap door in the gallows. When exhumed years later to verify he was still in the grave, it was colorfully reported that his fingernails and hair had grown. Probably, the fact that the fluids from his body had evaporated, shrink wrapping his body with skin and thus exaggerated the length of hair and nails in comparison to his face and hands was ignored.
Once in the 1930’s, Great Uncle Artie, his sister Pearl, and my Great Grandparents were in the process of relocating to Espanola, New Mexico, where the Pueblo Indian huts along the Rio Grande and adobe Mexican homes scattered on historic Spanish Land Grant land, provided good mercantile opportunities for a “white” man. That venture ended when Uncle Artie died of asthma and Great Grandpa became melancholy and longed to move back to Seneca near Pop and Grandma. Dad recalls driving with Pop and Uncle Adrian to Espanola to move them back. Tires were precious and every few miles they’d stop to fix a flat tire. They’d jack up the car, remove the tire and locate the cause of the flat, pull out and inflate the tube, and spit on it to locate the hole where escaping air caused the spit to bubble. Then the area around the hole was roughed and cleaned with a file and then a hot patch kit was screwed to the tube with a device. The patch had something like gunpowder or maybe the easily ignited material found in fire works. That was fired with a match and it flared for a few seconds, melding the tube and the patch. Careful to inspect the interior of the tire, any nail was removed and thrown well away from the road as a courtesy to the next travelers. Replacing the tire, the car was lowered and they traveled on until the routine was again necessary.
Once, Grandma Hartman (formerly Douglass) shushed me and made me sit down. Riding down Polk Street in Amarillo, Texas with Parker and Grandma Hartman, I stood between them, excited as a four or five year old can be seeing a big town with people out on the busy street. “Looky, looky, Grandma. There’s a nigger”. Polk Street was named for President Polk who took the Manifest Destiny Doctrine to Mexico and insured New Mexico became part of the United States as a result of the Mexican American War. It also made many Mexicans into Americans.
Once, a cousin and I visited about the immigrants who come to United States and perform the labor that some “Americans” are unwilling or are not forced to do. (This is another version of slave labor in my opinion). Anyway he said he didn’t mind them coming up to our country but he didn’t like them changing our language. Along the border towns there are movements to have dual language education or disseminate public information in Spanish and English. Because the issue is too complicated and because I love him, I couldn’t bring myself to point out that the Texas Revolution and the Mexican/American War changed the official language of a large portion of the Texas and New Mexico population over a hundred and fifty years ago. Sometimes, major cultural issues aren’t solved by talking about them with loved ones.
The issue of race crept into little songs that were sung. They weren’t mean spirited per se, but reflect the times. With no malice, June, a Douglass aunt and a worker down in east Texas, would sing to all the children as she passed through our homes, “I’m a little pickaninney, blacker than a crow. I’m as sweet as black molasses, ‘cause mammy told me so”. It seemed cute, but as time wore on and times changed it seemed increasingly inappropriate and in the latter years, I don’t recall hearing it sung. At the dinner for their sixty fifth wedding anniversary in 2009, Mom and Dad sang a catchy duet from their young days about a little slave boy who fell in love with May a slave girl with another owner. “Oh May, dearest May. You’re lovely as the day. Your eyes so bright, they shine at night and gwine away” “I cried so hard when I leff her, cause Massa came….” Again, there was no malice, just a facet of our culture.
And, finally, there was the occasion in the 1950’s that we were a happy family on our way to convention with three little kids in the back seat. Someone said “Dale, I bet you are going to grow up and marry a little black girl.” And I was teased when I wouldn’t deny that I might just marry a little black girl. So now in the late 2000’s it is with that background that I add a side note of introduction for Rochelle Alexander of Paducah, Tennessee, a lady with sensuous, slender ebony hands and calls me “the man with the hugs” in her emails. I would like to think that maybe, just maybe some of that legendary Grandma Oldham goodness crept into my blood. I know my angst over this issue may sound patronizing to the black race. Having lived among black people in the Army, on the street, in rehabs and elsewhere, I know, to my regret, that they sense something of old, southern bigotry in me. Probably, I will never be allowed a close relationship with most of them it is why it is important that Rochelle loved me because she recognized it and forgave it. Perhaps in the spirit of Grandma Oldham, my children will carry balm to the racial rupture.

Down near Seneca

About twenty miles southeast of my childhood home near Mt. Dora, is Seneca, New Mexico, another near forgotten place. There, ten to fifteen miles from the panhandle borders of both Texas and Oklahoma, the soil is sandier, but marginally better suited for farming than Mt. Dora to the northwest. Seneca was almost “Ground Zero” for the Dust Bowl. Rabbit Ear Mountain shadows this country and from certain angles it’s said to resemble the face of an Indian chief. From various perspectives of the rock structures, I’ve recognized the form of the dead Cheyenne Chief (Rabbit Ear) probably killed in a battle with Spanish colonialists in 1717. Coronado is said to have passed through this area in his futile search into what is now Kansas for the Lost Cities of Gold. Every town in eastern New Mexico and some towns in West Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado can suggest that Coronado passed through their area since the route isn’t precisely known. As far south as Carlsbad, there are such vague assertions. Coronado amassed a large expedition searching for the cities and was encouraged by the corroboration of natives who repeatedly pointed him to the north and east, probably to rid themselves of the strangers. It’s speculated that marvelous sunsets cast a golden hue on some pueblo and thus the myth of “The Cities of Gold” grew. So Coronado finally reached Kansas to the northeast and encountered some pitifully poor Wichita Indians. Returning to Mexico he was regarded as an abject failure for the rest of his life. I can almost hear Parker chuckle again (“and he died”), because in some strange way, Coronado was another who made his mark and died, disappointed by the reality of a land that offered less than expected. I believe, but cannot establish that Grandpa Douglass was drawn to Grenville and Mt. Dora by deceptive land speculators. The facts that Coronado took his massive expedition as far as he did, or that my family survived in this country are no small feats.
The experiences in the darkness of the depression and dust bowl days paint a picture of the Oldham’s determination to survive. After leaving the Carroll home and stalled in the car, the Oldham family endured one dust storm breathing through rags dampened with water that Pop (Grandpa Oldham) drained from the radiator. In the aftermath, Aunt Ellen Oldham’s future husband, Shearon Carroll, walked through the eerie, filmy dust, across dunes of sand up to the tops of fence posts, to find and aid the family. For weeks on end, the skies were yellowish from sunlight filtered through the atmospheric dust. In Washington D.C. and along the Eastern U.S. seaboard, these storms darkened the days and confused chickens and maritime navigation. Both Oldham and Douglass families were simply in the middle of an event characterized as “the worst man made environmental disaster in history”.
So, Seneca is where my Dad grew up. Pop and Grandma Oldham, drawn by the misleading allure of cheap, dry land, left east Texas in about 1920 and bought some ground in the dry, heartless grassland. They farmed with horse teams and eventually a tractor. They farmed in stinging wind and dirt, blistering sun and freezing mornings. Dad let it slip once that he thought if I’d sat on a tractor for sixteen hours a day, I might’ve been more inclined to stick with something.
Pop loved grandma. That is without question. There is a post card picture of him as a lumber jack at the base of a huge redwood tree in California. Affectionate writing is on the reverse side. Jody (my sister Jonell is called Jody) recalls him leaning his head on grandma’s casket and weeping. I watched him as the family passed by Grandma Oldham’s casket for the last time. Somehow he got through the sheer veil and kissed her and then extracted himself from the shroud. Later, so strong was his memory of her, he told of waking to her calling out, “Walter, Walter.” Shortly thereafter, he returned to the fellowship she’d embraced. Although to me his stories were gloomy and sad Pop was generous, warm and loving to his family. My memory of Grandma is vague. Grandma’s legacy to those who knew her, including my mother, is almost saintly. Mom was among those in the family that changed the dressings on the putrid open wounds of her breast cancer. (Mom told me it was lung cancer, presumably because little boys shouldn’t hear words like “breast”) Grandma Oldham died when I was five and I have a vague memory of her talking to us as we played in the dirt near the old wringer washing machine (the same machine in which my cousin Linda Carroll caught and badly scarred her hand and arm) outside their back door.
It is good to reflect for a moment on Grandma Oldham’s life. Her line of people included names like Seabolt and Coyle. Seabolt was Grandma’s maternal side and Coyle was the paternal side. When she was ten days old, her mother died in East Texas and her Grandpa Seabolt in Kentucky stepped and provided support as well as a nanny and nursemaid who will be mentioned briefly later. At some point Grandma’s father remarried and back in his custody, she was abused and neglected by her stepmother who was reported to have mental issues. Grandma told of having head lice. So, once again my Great Grandpa Seabolt was there and ultimately, I believe, bequeathed her the property that seeded the comparative success of Pop in later years. Grandma’s gentle goodness is still spoken about today, and I believe her presence and legacy is alive today in Aunt Ellen Carroll (age 95) and some of my cousins. Jim Carroll, my cousin who honored me as “the brother he never had”, embodies a similar innate goodness that was reported present in Grandma Oldham. Among others but not limited to, I sense such gentle goodness in my cousin, Avabelle Oldham. Perhaps because I was so young and my times there were sad, my memories of their home is of huge old trunks in dark rooms, old furniture, old photographs of stern severe people, and the smells of moth balls and kerosene lanterns. Others in my family recall happier things.
The roots of my grandparents, Walter (Pop) and Belle Oldham, are somewhere in Kentucky. The names Seabolt and Coyle run through my Grandma’s family. Stewart is a family name from Pop’s (Grandpa Oldham) family. My dad has quaint letters that my Great Grandpa Seabolt wrote to my grandma Oldham in which he reported on the farm and prices received for crops, pigs and eggs. There was a sweet relationship that comes through in these letters hinting at strong grandfather/daughter bonds. I should quote one or two of those letters here and will, should I get access to them. My great grandmother Coyle (nee Seabolt) died ten days after Grandma was born and a black woman became Grandma’s nurse maid – her name long forgotten. Being from the south, in “Jim Crow” times, grandma apparently grieved at the way she personally treated this black woman who’d breastfed her. It seems the nursemaid was an ongoing presence in Grandma’s life after she was weaned. When Pop went back to Kentucky to visit Grandma’s family in the early sixties, several years after Grandma died, he took a picture of this forgotten old woman who remembered him as “Miz Belle’s husband”. From the stories told and from the nature some of her children inherited, my grandmother must have been very tender hearted. In a time when people ridiculed “niggers” with no second thought, Grandma Oldham stands out to me as a force of conscience in a shameful period for America and both sides of my family.

Growing up in the sixties - Northeast New Mexico

Excerpt from my writings about my childhood.

Consuming the strength of generations, that northeastern New Mexico country still beckons me and should it be convenient, I ask to be taken there in cremated form and scattered along with, as she’s consented, the like remains of my little sister, Janis. Perhaps, scattered there, where we played will address some emotional need in me to return as part of that land. Maybe it could be a private, token memorial of my sister, Janis. Those really aren’t ashes in the cardboard boxes, as the romantics call them, but are gravel like residue of bones that cannot be consumed at a crematorium. Perhaps our cremains can be dumped near what’s left of the tree house I built and then gave her when she asked; or maybe under the other tree house I built for myself and where I ate chunks of cheese and bread, because I’d read a neat story about a kid who built a tree house and spend summers in it dreaming and eating cheese and bread; or maybe the remains can be scattered down on the creek where the horse and ox teams of the Santa Fe Trail immigrants and troops watered. Edwin and Robert Smith know where it is as would Douglass Rice, and Jody would remember. Dan and Karen Bryan are familiar with the layout.

This country lies just before the foothills begin an ascent to the Rocky Mountains to the north and west, leaving the fertile llano de estado (the staked planes of West Texas) to the south and east. A place where Coronado may have traversed, and certainly where the Cheyenne, Comanche and Kiowa tribes camped and left flint workings for me to find one to two hundred years later. These were the lands where Mexicans arrived with two wheeled carts to trade with Indians in a time before Europeans set foot in New Mexico.

This is a place desolate, but beautiful, where the banks of the deepening ruts of the Cimarron Cut Off on the Santa Fe Trail reveal buried bison bones. Several layers evidence the near extinction of the specie slaughtered to satisfy nineteenth century eastern demand for buffalo robes. In this vast land, wind howled and whipped snow to the eaves of the old house Granddad built. Wet seasons produced tall grass with slight tints of green and fattened cattle bred to thrive in that climate. Dry seasons withered crops and starved cattle and the inhabitants survived or didn’t survive.


Grandma Hartman, formerly Douglass, called the ones who left “quitters”. She called my Dad a “quitter” when drought and the struggle to survive broke my parent’s emotional strength to combat the New Mexican winds, dust and blizzards. Wet seasons and high grain prices in the early 1900’s saw maniacal grabs of land for farming. This left enormous areas of sod broken in a climate to harsh for tillage. Homesteaders and immigrants like my grandfather made unnatural agrarian claims on this land meant for grass.

Bred to work the soil, they eked out livings doing the only thing that was natural to them. Once loosened and in open rebellion during dry seasons, the earth blew away in billowing dust clouds, and sometimes choked the very life out of the people who trusted it for sustenance. Autopsies revealed lungs clogged with New Mexico dirt. Thus, the dust bowl, of which the geographical heart was a few miles east near Boise City, Oklahoma, left the land of my childhood scarred. In the fifties and sixties, we helped mom clean out dirt blown in through the cracks of the house in windstorm after nasty windstorm. The legacy of the early century farming practices lingers into our current century as some land will never recover its former fertility in our lifetimes.

Surprisingly, a similar mania occurs today in Eastern New Mexico, West Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas and elsewhere as subterranean water, know as the Ogallala reservoir, is tapped to irrigate the same lands that lost its topsoil in the depression and dustbowl era. Vast, prolific fields are watered and wells are drilled deeper and deeper as water tables recede. The reality is that in some unromantic way in a not to distant future, the grass that grows naturally will return and feed a few cattle or sheep. It takes about thirty acres of grass to sustain a cow and calf unit for a year. No wonder “quitters” quit in those desolate years when the price of land, the cost of living and the allure of longer, happier lives put to rest the dreams of early immigrant settlers trained for centuries in the east and Europe to farm the land.

One summer, with mom and Grandma Hartman in the back seat, I was sandwiched between Parker Hartman, my step granddad, and Dad, in the front seat of Parker and Grandma’s old 1953 Chevy coupe. Parker and Grandma had sold the Mt. Dora ranch to my parents a few years before. We toured the back roads north of our house (the one Granddad built) along which the Weeses, Hemphills, Wisemans, Carders, Jones, and countless others abandoned or sold their rock and sod homes and moved with the times to greener, kinder places like California or Oregon. Passing each homestead and remembering the people, Parker finally quoted from Genesis 5, “and he died”. We passed the pile of sandstone rocks which was all that remained of the forgotten Mock place, where on a narrow bed, Grandpa Douglass slept with his arms wrapped around Mr. Mock to prevent him from killing himself. Parker again quoted, “and he died”. Mr. Mock finally succeeded. As Parker chuckled sadly, or quietly mused, we drove on as he and Dad discussed the bible, those forgotten people who’d populated that country and, finally, our ultimate state before God. In the back seat, Mom and Grandma talked about us, the kids; Nellie, Francis, Winnie, Louise, June, Robert, Evelyn, Lorene, Buddy Scott, Marilynn McKelvey, Harry, Mary, well, you get it, all of us Douglass kin. Maybe it was about the last round robin letters. (These were letters where each of mom’s siblings would write a letter and mail the packet on, removing from the packet the letter from the next recipient.) We were known, remembered and treasured.

Parker Hartman married Grandma after Grandpa was killed. Parker was our living grandpa on the Douglass side, although the family simply called him “Parker”. Formerly an itinerant preacher or a “worker” following the teachings of Matthew 10 as best he and others knew at the time, my Grandma (from old pictures, I’d say she was a desirable chick) captured Parker’s heart and, clearly, he was besotted with her. Rubbing her back long into the night when she couldn’t sleep, (Edwin remembers an ever present chamber pot by her bed less than twelve feet from the bathroom door) taking her fishing and catering to her children. We cousins thought of Parker as our granddad. He was always kind, happy or teaching us the bible or hymns. In his final days in the hospital, Parker was heard down the hall from his room singing “This world is not my home”. His last words spoken to Frank Allen were, “Well, I think I’ll call it a day,” and he went to sleep. It wasn’t until years later that Kevin Smith thought to name a great grandchild after Parker. He named another child, Clayton, presumably after the town, Clayton, New Mexico. I’m not the only person in my family whose fondest memories are tied to the region.

Although Parker taught us love for the scripture, he brought another aspect to the community. Having moved from place to place as an itinerant preacher, he noticed methods which improved comfort of homes. And thus, running water became more common in the homes he visited and he introduced a novel innovation: the cess pit. Formerly, when outdoor toilets were full they were simply moved or another built close by. Suggesting they be built over a hole about four feet deep, Parker lengthened the useful life of the average outdoor toilet.

At Mt. Dora, the home place, the outdoor toilet had to be moved further away from the well house when a foul taste and smell tainted the water. Also, probably a new well was drilled, because the water table was less than ten feet down in this location of the campsites on the Santa Fe Trail or of the nomadic Comanche or Kiowa. Here is a land with vast amounts of water just under a surface that is brown and dry most of the year.

Taming Wild Rivers

Food was integral to our way of life. We were producers of food. We gardened, ranched and farmed and I, the boy, milked the cow with strong streams so that the milk foamed in the bucket and ran over the side. I’d put my head into the cow’s flank to keep her stepping in the bucket or kicking me and partially avoided the scratch of pee soaked cockleburs in her tail as she swiped it back and forth over her back to scare flies. In this manner, I generally managed to milk her while occasionally squirting a stream of warm milk at the cats. In the kitchen the milk was strained through a linen cloth and set in refrigerator until the cream, being lighter, rose to the top and was skimmed off. That old cow was called “Old Reddy” and I cried when Dad hauled her off to the sale barn to be sold for rendering just as I cried when I buried my rabbit. An ignored life (even when wheezing and dying in freezing weather on its last overcast, gray day) constituted the existence of that rabbit in a hutch except for a door slam when watered and fed a few grains of maize by a preoccupied boy.

In the summer, I was responsible for watering the garden, so a hoe without a handle became my bull dozer and I built contoured roads, mammoth dams and reservoirs and diverted raging rivers down rows of corn and beans allowing the water to sink into the murky, dark swamps of the tomato and rhubarb patches.

Late in the summer and early fall, my mom and aunts canned green beans, black-eyed peas, corn and peaches when Kerr Jars were a staple and lids popped as the jars cooled and sealed the hot fruit and vegetables safely inside. Butchering in the fall after a freeze killed the flies and bugs was routine. Some calf or steer (heifers were more valuable) would be shot, its throat cut and bled out. Gutted, skinned and quartered, the beef hung and cured from the windmill, safe from coons, badgers, bobcats, coyotes, and domestic pets. Similarly, we’d go down to my father’s people near Seneca and a hog was shot, dipped in a boiling barrel of water, and the hair was scraped off before butchering the hog. In dead of winter I would be sent to dig out carrots preserved safely in the frozen ground. We were close to our food. So in the earlier depression years, when much of the country was hungry during the depression, my parents’ families were fed. They had little money for other things, but starvation was never an issue. In that country, if people dropped by, a meal was customary. To this day, my parents feel obliged to offer food in abundance to any visitor.

Fried Chicken

Once, I remember, Grandma Hartman moved slowly through the gossipy, clucking chickens and she swiftly swooped in with a bent hanger wire and pulled out a hapless, squawking pullet upside down by its legs and carried it flopping to the chopping block. Suddenly quiet, with its comb perched atop a head on a neck crimped over the edge of the block, the bird blinked and darted its eyes and beak right and left just before Grandma whacked down the stained hatchet and sent the head flying over by a boiling vat of water. The body flopped and squirted blood around the chicken yard strewn with chicken droppings, corn cobs, feathers and loose dirt. Near the wide open eye in the dead pullet’s head, Grandma dunked the body in the vat of boiling water. After it cooled a bit, she wiped the white Leghorn feathers off the legs and body with her hands and flung them into the chicken yard. Next the naked chicken was gutted and washed. The joints were severed into thighs, necks, breasts, backs, and wings, nearly ready for Grandma’s frying pan.

After rolling the parts in flour, Grandma heated lard from a can in a cast iron skillet and fried the chicken in spattering, hot grease. Then we participated in rural America’s customary feast of fried chicken, okra, corn on the cob, and green beans cooked with a strip of bacon or a hairy (not really) ham hock. The adults talked about the bible, people, politics, weather and any kid could sit on any lap and be hugged and loved. Fed and content, my cousin Edwin and I went outside and I sat on him before we saddled the horses, hunted arrow heads or played in the ruts of the Santa Fe Trail. Maybe we just talked and talked. Now, it’s profound to remember those treasured times when we were loved, protected and secure.

With Dad

Mama's Singing

Growing up and singing around an old upright piano for which my grandmother'd traded a steer in the 1920's, brought pleasure, fun and consolation in the bleak northeastern corner of New Mexico where I was raised. My mother self taught herself to play that piano and could play by note and by ear. That talent was passed on to us, particularly to my sisters who could've both been classical pianists, but were music teachers instead.

Mom memorized all the words of our fellowship's hymnal and it is a fond memory when I recall her singing the words while she moved about our home. Her humming and singing left those tunes and songs embedded in my consciousness. While Mom was not always a contented person, I believe she found strength in her singing. I believe those songs in part invited the spiritual serenity she sought.

In recent years, trying to find peace in my life, I've attempted to be cognizant of the first thoughts in my mind upon awakening. It seems those thoughts and feelings might be the first outside influence in my life for that day, and I've attempted train myself to listen at that point. When I'm successful, often flowing melodically through my mind are those songs of my mother and sometimes, just sometimes, I imagine the beauty of Mom's voice coming through sixty years of life, seeking and inviting that peace for me as she hums them now in my memory.

"Oh, love, that will not let me go".