Welcome Sweetie Berry As Wednesday's Guest Blogger

First of all I want to say that I am just tickled pink to be here today. What a joy it was to have met Dana in person at Blissdom '10. You know when perfect strangers meet and come away friends it’s a great day!

My blog’s name is Growing into Lovely. It may be more of a hope than a certainty, but you see where I am from in the deep South, lovely is a term that means so much more than pretty. Lovely is reserved for those women who overcome adversity with grace, who face unexpected strife with peace, who choose to be elegant in behavior and deed even when knee deep in mud….you see I want to be that kind of woman, she’s perhaps best described in Proverbs…but she’s a pretty busy girl…yet …

Who is it that you admire? Who are the women in your life that immediately come to mind when I ask who influenced you? For me, there are several who come to mind immediately. There’s Virginia Smith, a woman in her seventies, who built with her husband Guy, the first public bank begun with GI Bill funds after Guy returned from the war. (Her daddy bought her a convertible for their wedding, Guy sold it the next day because it wasn’t “fittin” for a new bank to be high fallutin...don’t you know the discussions that brought!) They began Stephens Bank successfully over forty years ago and that one branch has grown into several. Virginia’s financial success is overshadowed by her community and personal success. Harder to measure, but one only has to walk through her small town to see or experience her impact. Virginia is a “get it done” girl. She sees fertilizer in manure piles and manicures in mud….that girl only knows the bright side of life. She is a cancer survivor, a wifehood thriver, and will wear you out if you try to keep up with all that she does in a day. She calls me Mrs. Jefferson, because I so embraced her need to help others grow….and I am honored that she feels so. There wasn’t an idea I had in that little town the five years we lived there that she didn’t say “let’s do it” and by golly we did, whether it was to build a city park with grant funds (which stands today) or to begin a children’s library program for the town’s children at no cost (which we did, with over 50 children attending each week for 12 weeks a summer!) or to host a town wide inter generational Easter Egg hunt at her home and mine ….amazing days we had, and Virginia fueled them all with her absolute belief that our tiny town was simply waiting for an idea to be enacted to succeed.

Another woman I admire was Lillian Bell. Lillian was nearing eighty when I met her. You’d think that meant she had slowed down. Oh my heavens no. She had reared ten children in a two bedroom home, canned enough food each year from her own garden to feed them, and managed to keep them all done up in homemade clothes that were the talk of the town for their “store bought” appearance. Lillian was a school teacher, a wife, and in her spare time after keeping every thing at home spic and span, she was known for her delicious cooking, which she shared all over town to anyone ailing, sad, or someone she thought looked puny…after all food was a cure all for everything in my small town. Her twinkling blue eyes would look at you and say “come on now, have another bite” as though she knew if she could sit you down over pie she’d have you….for no one would not do as Miss Lillian suggested. Many a contrary situation was settled over Miss Lillian’s visit with a pie.

As much as I admire women like Mother Teresa and Eleanor Roosevelt, I’ve not had to rely on folks in history books or biographies to know what a fine lady is. You see, in my book it doesn’t take fine trappings, or exceptional wealth to create the lovely I’m talking about. Growing into lovely to me means to daily look about you, to do what you can with what you have to improve today. To choose to take the high road with other people who may have gotten stuck in the valleys and mud holes of life. To willfully ignore the desire to get in the mud with those folks who sling it unnecessarily in unkind thought or deed. (although I also am a firm believer in splashing in them if the mud hole warrants a good old fashioned mess to be made…after all, growing into lovely means never growing old either.)

One of the most beautiful faces I’ve ever known was a lady I taught next to in a tiny rural district. She was in her 62 year old teaching…yes you read right sixty-two years, and she taught next door to me. Miss Eva had taught mothers, daddies, and grand daddies in that district. She had married young and then was widowed early, left with young children on a school teacher’s budget. Remarried years later it seemed cruel, but her second husband failed to mention that he had ten children stowed away until their wedding day…suddenly there were twelve children to feed as well as a new marriage. She never missed a beat, they made do, made over, and remade what they had and it was all kept well. Miss Eva’s second husband died shortly after and there she was with all the children, a school marms salary, and yet her flower gardens were beautiful, the children fed well, and before it was over, she had a beautiful home they had renovated together and several through college. When I would ask her about teaching so long she’d tease me “Wouldn’t you keep working if you had twelve goomers waiting on you at home?” Yet she was a delicate cultivator, learning how to garden in containers long before it was vogue, because with 12 children and a tiny town, well, you had to eat! Later when we moved down the street, she was first up and regularly up to help me with this or that in the yard. Despite being in her nineties, she could out work me any day! She and my youngest had a special relationship, Madison is dyslexic, but Miss Eva personally was determined to see her through….and she did. and it is a good portion of why Madison reads so well today.

Growing into Lovely…..a huge standard to have had set by ladies like the ones above, and there’s a passel of them in my home town…you see there isn’t a common qualifier among them: wealth, background, beauty or education- but they all choose a path of service to others and to gather around them those who were near to love them well and make the best of the situations they faced while persevering on with joy. That’s the kind of woman I want to be when I grow up….and yet each one of those three would never be mistaken for a “grown up”…for you see one of the most important attributes they shared was to be eternally young at heart.

Thank you for letting me share here today. It’s been such a pleasure to visit today!

Hugs,

Sweetie

Thanks Sweetie, for your lovely thoughts.  You are certainly one of the lovely ladies and I feel blessed to have met you and look forward to a long sister/friendship.  Blessings, dear one.   Rosie