By Frances Stebbins
Correspondent
[This is a memory from the many decades the author has been privileged to write for daily and weekly newspapers circulating in Western Virginia.]
With the end of 2021 in sight, it’s time to look back a bit and try to glimpse a few things we hope for the future.
The weekly publication of this Memoir, “Give Light…” with the subtitle “and the people will find their own way” dates from four years ago. Following the example of Ed McCoy, the longtime editor of “The Fincastle Herald,” I decided at the end of 2017 to retire from active news coverage of Religion issues in the Roanoke Valley and instead continue to write for Mountain Media publishers, but in the form of a weekly Memoir column.
In time, the column evolved from a direct tie with a faith issue of the past and now covers many subjects I’ve reflected on over my ten decades. As the lifespan in the United States has lengthened – before the COVID pandemic has taken so many lives – it has become relatively common to know people in their 90s, and some of them still physically active and mentally alert and stimulating.
For instance, the past weekend in my Salem church, I attended two memorial services for women long connected to the congregation. One was 97 and, though physically failing, was able to attend worship in a wheelchair until her final weeks. The other, though showing her age in mind and body, died four days short of her 90th birthday.
I have talked with a lucid woman of 102 at the Virginia Veterans Care Center as she came to worship there. And most of all I marvel at a friend of 50 years duration living in a Lexington retirement home who may see her 100th birthday on April 15, 2022. A phone conversation with her is a delight.
All of us can remember much about World War II and some things that affected our families in the 1930s years of the Great Depression.
Which is to say, I hope to continue to publish the column in 2022. It’s older people who still read their newspapers these days and who often tell me they can relate to events, movies, books and other happenings I mention. Perhaps being restricted in getting about more in the pandemic has increased this tendency to look back.
{Since Christmas is nearing, this is a good chance to remind readers that, although this newspaper will be published next week, it will contain only a review of significant stories of 2021. This permits the staff to rest. My next column will appear on January 6, 2022.}
In this Digital Age, it’s now possible to send holiday greetings by several means other than the Postal Mail – to the weakening position of the United States Postal Service. My age contemporaries – for lack of energy, wits or money for needed postage – have largely given up the many pretty cards once sent. My detailed family letters, mailed for the past 40 years, were scrapped this Yuletide season, and greetings went only to those who sent them to me.
It’s a sad reality of Old Age as well as conditions through which we are living.
I telephoned a female cousin by marriage, part of the vast Stebbins clan who still resides in Halifax County’s rural Southside Virginia. A pianist for her local church, she publishes poetry even at 94. Widowed from her first cousin now for many years, she rejoices that all her eight children are, not only still living, but are close by enough to come frequently to visit her at the old “home place.”
That doesn’t happen a lot now. Families differ in “closeness.” Especially in the years following World War II, American corporations often moved their white-collar or management personnel around the nation; some also were affected by a father’s military service.
Being an “only” living with my widowed mother, I was totally accustomed to being with some of my deceased father’s family every Christmas. Most of them lived within an hour’s drive of our home in Piedmont Virginia, but my mother had no car, and the family place was a mile off a paved road. Young adult cousins drove over to pick us up when I was a small child, and we stayed in the rambling old house for three days where there was a big stone chimney for Santa to descend.
Family changes when I was seven sent us to a nearby city reached for the day by bus or train, and this continued until my college days and the death of my mother.
For me, however, it was not Christmas to stay at home, and for years thereafter with my own husband and children we found some elderly cousins with which we spent the afternoon, a bad memory for my now aging daughter and son.
And now I am the last of my generation. A long life and many memories on which to reflect.