I will turn 60 this year...in those sixty years no one has ever come close to being the complete person that she was. She, like many of her generation were lucky if they even got any education at all beyond home schooling. She did get a little grade school...and yet she had an intelligence that far surpassed most all that I have ever known. She did not judge people, somehow she understood them.....and she forgave their weakness and indiscretions, and not only wished them well, if she could help any person in any way she never hesitated...and she never spoke of them in any terms beyond praise. "You cain't judge other folks" she always said.. .."because you don't know what they are dealing with or lived through." She was my Daddy's Mama, so technically she was my Grandma, yet realistically she was also the only Mother I ever knew. My birth Mother suffered through a lot in life, not many folks could have dealt with the hand she drew.....but she lived life, and did the best she could, while she could... She had nothing to be ashamed of. Grandma was always working, up at Dawn everyday cooking breakfast on the Wood Stove, washing clothes in a large galvanized wash bucket and scouring them clean on an old corrugated wash board that removed skin as much as it removed the red clay topsoil of Southside, Va. She ironed with a flat iron you put on the wood stove to get hot first, and pressed and folded everything...right on down to pillowcases and handkerchiefs. She worked the tobacco fields into her mid 80's handing leaves all day while traipsing back and forth from barn to house... to cook dinner for up to ten folks on a wood stove. She managed all this with no running water....all water came from the well. The wood stove had a reservoir on the side that helped warm water in addition to that she warmed in a cast iron kettle on top of the stove. Washing dinner dishes afterward one by one, in an old beaten up stainless steel wash pan, drying them and putting them up as she went along. When Barn day was over and we were all bone tired, she was shelling beans and getting ready to cook supper. Usually Navy Beans, my DNA is most likely mainly Navy Beans and Potato Soup. But.....if I were given a choice of a last meal....and anyone to eat it with...I would sit down with Grandma one last time and I would eat the best meal with the most wonderful person.... this heart can remember   Sarah Thompson Reese 1898-1994