taking up a bit more space in my head and heart this week. Springtime reminds me of her birthdate, April 28, so I suppose it is only natural to feel a stronger tug to memories and moments shared with her.
From her days on a farm in the 1930s to graduate school in the 1980s, she was a reader and a learner. The decades of her 50’s and 60’s found her teaching the second language (Spanish) she had fallen in love with at Rotan High School under Miss Josey Baird. After retirement, Mother’s residences went from Port Townsend, Washington, back home to the dusty plains in Brownfield. Lillie Mae’s final three years gave her proximity to doctors and family in Lubbock as she continued to read, color, sleep, and watch all the sports she loved on cable television.
The photos are of a person I did not know: the little girl who thought she needed to entertain her family through their griefstricken years after her father died. The solemn nineyear- old in front of their sand-blasted farmhouse in the 1930s. The 15-year-old starting a new school after the Dowell School closed. And almost two years later, the high school senior ready to tackle the world. She had no way of knowing how cruel and beautiful life would be after high school graduation in 1948.
From her graduate school days, her cursive class notes jumped off the page when I read them. All these years later, I can see her writing with a fury about a truth she had long known.
I am sad that her final years brought sadness while watching her country regress into a divisive abyss. My well-read and informed Mother suffered no fools when it came to politics, and she saw an abundance the last two years of her life. It makes me happy to think she did get to vote for a woman in her last presidential election.
I miss her laugh especially. Fewer things made my brothers and sisters happier than to make her laugh. It was a competition among the five of us to do so.
In memory and honor of Lillie Mae McCleskey Sullivan, her namesake Lillie and Lillie’s sister Ellie will make a cake April 28. I bet they will decorate it with hideous blobs of multicolored sprinkles.
And if Mother were with us, she would laugh and laugh and laugh.
Snyder, Texas, native Sue Jane Sullivan is a retired schoolteacher whose thought-provoking commentary appears occasionally in several West Texas newspapers, including The Texas Spur and The Caprock Courier.
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