In Memory of Warren Starke (1939-1992)

The Vine Spring, 1993 After the service, back at the house,  someone asked about the vine  on the front fence. You remember, the one  I always nagged you  to dig up and out and gone  because the thick dead trails  of thin gray string made such a mess  after the blooms stopped and I was tired of cleaning the fence.  You always refused,  saying--approval in your voice--  the vine paid its way in blossom time. Disinterested, I regarded  the small flowers  in the mass of crawling vine and  tried to give it a name.  I couldn't. Later, someone exclaimed,  "Look!  A hummingbird vine!"  and moved to get a closer look.  In the afterfuneral smalltalk, two visitors  recalled childhood memories  richly flavored with such a vine.  To a chorus of startmesome, I promised.

Today, for the second year  I've known the name,  I pulled the gray tendrils off the fence  and I thought of you. And, with pleasure, I thought of  the perfect, five-pointed blossoms unpretentious scarlet stars soon to appear summer's bright red dots punctuating the delicate, dark green traceries  cascading, looping from post to post  hiding the ugly wire fence.

National Siblings Day Post – A Day Late

It’s appropriate that this post is a day late because I don’t have any siblings! But I am lucky to have had ten wonderful cousins: four on my mother’s side in one Alabama family, and six on my father’s, three in Alabama and three in South Carolina.  My maternal grandmother lived in my second home across the street from my four Oneonta cousins so the five of us grew up together, and I thought of them as mine before I ever heard the word siblings and realized I didn't have any. During my growing-up years, I spent nearly every Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and Mother’s Day with them, plus weeks in the summer.

This picture was taken on Mother’s Day.  Although I don’t know the year because there is no notation on the back (Oh, Mama, why didn’t you? Maybe the same reason I didn’t either?) I know it was Mother’s Day. I look at the flowers and remember our annual ritual of cutting white and red roses in Grandmother’s garden, making a white corsage for her, and pinning red roses on each other.

When I was about ten, the five of us stood in a circle, held hands, and solemnly promised each other that we would never, under any circumstances, become teachers.  Why was such a commitment necessary? We were supersaturated with school things.  Both of my parents and my aunt were teachers.  My grandmother was the principal of the elementary school, and my grandfather was the superintendent of education for Blount County.  Of the five of us, three became teachers!

Although I was greatly influenced by my cousins, we departed ways when it came to college loyalty. As the child of an Auburn staff member, I of course yelled War Eagle, while the others screamed Roll Tide. (The youngest cousin, however, wound up at Georgia Tech with a PhD in something way out there, like nuclear physics.)

I look at this picture with sadness because these four cousins are all gone now but also with happiness because I still enjoy the great memories of our time together.