My grandmother Mary Clanton was an amazing woman. She came to mind a few minutes ago and I was helping diaper our newest grandson, Asher. I remembered her by the well on her knees in the South Georgia sun, washing clothes with a scrub board. She would have had to drawn enough water from the well to boil for washing and rinsing the clothes either outside in a black kettle or inside on the wood stove. Then she hung them on the clothes line to dry.

The more I thought about her just now, it makes me ashamed to ever say, “I’m tired.” She ran a family farm with no electricity, tractors, plumbing, as a widowed mother of seven (her twins died as infants) with no hired help. Her sunlit pantry was always full of colorful jars of fruits and vegetables. The smokehouse was full of smoked meats hanging there. She. packed fresh meat in lard filled crockery jars. Her home and fields were always neat and clean. She churned butter in old fashioned butter churn and milked cows by hand.

I remember her cooking and baking at a wood fired stove. The best biscuits ever!

When it was time pick cotton she was in the fields working.

There was a home, corn crib, barn, livestock (mules, cows, hogs, chicken, and guinea fowl) to be cared for. Tobacco barns that were fueled by wood fires, and mule drawn equipment that she and my dad, uncles, and my aunt worked hard at daily.

Dad and my Aunt told me about how they would go to church and town (Nashville, Georgia) in a mule and wagon. Imagine your daily driver being a mule and wagon.

My best memory though is her holding me in a rocking chair on the front porch of the farmhouse. It is memories like this that make the hope of heaven even sweeter. As my wife said, when I shared what I was thinking. “Did she ever have time to enjoy life?” Heaven must have been so wonderful for her!

D. L. Moody quoted someone in a sermon. “When I was a boy, I thought of heaven as a great, shining city, with vast walls and domes and spires, and with nobody in it except white-robed angels, who were strangers to me. By and by my little brother died; and I thought of a great city with walls and domes and spires, and a flock of cold, unknown angels, and one little fellow that I was acquainted with. He was the only one I knew at that time. Then another brother died; and there were two that I knew. Then my acquaintances began to die; and the flock continually grew. But it was not till I had sent one of my little children to his Heavenly Parent—God—that I began to think I had a little in myself. A second went, a third went; a fourth went; and by that time I had so many acquaintances in heaven, that I did not see any more walls and domes and spires. I began to think of the residents of the celestial city as my friends. And now so many of my acquaintances have gone there, that it sometimes seems to me that I know more people in heaven than I do on earth.”

 D. L. Moody, Heaven: Where It Is, Its Inhabitants, and How to Get There (Chicago: Fleming H. Revell, 1884), 30–31.

All of that from changing my grandson’s diaper.

Peace!