Influencer(s) (#52Ancestors Week 5)

 #52ancestors 

Week 5 - Influencer(s)

Most people probably consider an “influencer” someone who has an influence on a large number of people.  I am going to write instead about several people who have had a large influence on me in the area of hospitality.

First up is my mother.  She has hosted countless people for meals.  We once had a chalkboard on the wall by the back door that became something of a guest book that everyone signed.  It was quite full.  We had a neighbor whose parents worked full-time, so when he got home from school, he knocked once on the back door, opened it, announced “I’m home!” and came on in.  We had teens and young adults who considered our house a second home.  My mother welcomed a young lady who needed a place to stay for a while.  She hosted several of her young-adult grandchildren at various times.  She learned from the best, her mother.

Grandmother told me her house was never perfectly clean, but that certainly didn’t stop people from coming.  She and Papa hosted family reunions, church picnics, hay rides, extended-family Thanksgiving dinners, Christmases, weddings, and watermelon feasts.  As children, we spent part of most summers there, and she kept a list inside the cabinet door of what each of us preferred for breakfast.  She packed sack lunches for us when we wanted to go exploring on the farm.  She welcomed my college friends and me, and she, too, had some of her young-adult grandchildren live with her while in transition.  She told me that her mother-in-law told her, “If there’s room in your heart, there’s room in your home.”

Grandma (my great-grandmother) was beyond the age of preparing meals when I knew her, so I don’t remember her for hospitality as I do for the things she made for us as children.  Her taking time to sew and crochet special things for us made a big impression on me.  But obviously she had a heart for hospitality because of what she taught her daughter-in-law.

Grandma (Minnie Loftis Williams) told a story about her mother, Louisa Chaffin Loftis, who was on her knees scrubbing clothes on a washboard when she got word that a neighbor had lost a child. She got up, left her laundry, dried her hands, and immediately went to offer what comfort she could.

My paternal grandmother’s home was a second home to me, especially when I was younger and Mama went back to school.  She did her best to instill in me a love of nature, even though I’ve never had a green thumb.  Many visitors left with flower cuttings or bulbs that she shared.  My yard has buttercups, irises, four o’clocks, arrowhead plants, surprise lilies, and day lilies from her yard, as well as a bridal wreath bush, hawthorn bush and burning bush.  When I went to visit with my children when they were small, she would fix a “goodie bag” for each child to take home, with various kinds of treats (especially Reese’s peanut butter cups).

I never met my great-grandparents, Ernest and Fannie McAbee Burgess, but Grandma Mac told me that some of her early memories were of her mother and father putting the children to bed and then heading off across the field by lantern with a tin pail of food for neighbors who were going through hard times.

None of these godly ladies will ever be famous, but each of them has had a profound influence on me, and for that I am very grateful.