Standing in the picture are Luthor and Jodie Mitchell and sister Myrtle May. Myrtle May was born in 1894 and her mother died in 1910. The picture was somewhere in between. Sitting are William M. Mitchell and wife Nettie. The little girl at Nettie's knee is Dovey James, daughter of the Mitchell's oldest daughter, Annie and her husband, Emerson James.
Outside the front door of Nettie's home was an unusual lily that she had been given by her mother when she married. When Nettie's two daughters married, each was given a start of the lily. That lily bloomed in Tennessee before 1860, in Texas from 1870, it bloomed in Indian Territory when Nettie moved from Texas. In 1912 in Oklahoma it bloomed in Myrtle May's front yard and was taken with her to New Mexico in 1926 when her family moved there. It was in Hobbs, New Mexico that I first saw the lily bloom both in my grandmother Myrtle's front yard, and in my mother Lillie's front yard. Nettie, Myrtle and Lillie are all gone now, and the lily blooms in my own front yard. I have sent it to all the other branches of family that I have been in contact with through genealogy and it now blooms in six other states. I am living back in Oklahoma some miles from where Nettie's lily grew. When it blooms I smell the sweet perfume, and know that the women that came before me, and I have a common love and bond, and it smells like lilies.
This lovely story was contributed by an equally lovely lady known only by her email address: Lgut800427@aol.com.
Editor's Note: Since this story was first published, the writer, I received an email from her cousin, Eva Murphy, advising that Leona Guthrie had passed away in Oklahoma City, OK, on the afternoon of October 7, 2004. The following is an excerpt of that mail: ...she [Leona] sent me a piece of the Lily 3 years ago, and it remains an everlasting link with our kin...Your pages meant the world to her, and the posting of the lily story is as true as imagination and love can make it...the fact is that the lily did come with our mutual great grandmother who passed it along to each girl child who married...we all have a piece, and if my own piece ever multiplies, it will go to each of my own girls.... Updated October 17, 2004
Published and © Copyrighted, February 10, 2002 by Betty Naff Mitchell. - Editor & Web Mistress |
