happy birthday

 

Taken in Benedict Hall, the parish house of Trinity, Apalachicola, one of my favorite snapshots is of Kristen, Malinda, and my mother sitting at a table for one of our parish dinners there. Kristen might be five years old, which would date the photo to 1998, the year I retired from parish ministry. Mama would have been 86. She lived two months past her 99th birthday.

Born 112 years ago today, May 7, 1912, Louise Gentry, Mama was the second child and oldest girl of Mamie and Walter Gentry. She was born at Bluff Springs, Century, Florida. Century is up US-29, which begins on Palafox Street in Pensacola and heads north. Vaguely, I remember being there a few Times as a boy. There's another photograph around here, framed, of my grandfather and his family gathered at the front porch of his parents' home for a wedding anniversary, and my mother is a little girl standing near her parents. 

The house is a typical old Florida farmhouse, unpainted, with the front porch tin roof held up by, maybe, two by fours, or maybe poles trimmed from a tree. That must have been the house where my grandfather and his brothers and sisters grew up.

Moving into yet another retirement, I'll have to search around here and get that old photograph out. It's one of my old treasures. If Mama was two or three, the photograph would date 1914 or 1915.

My grandparents moved into Pensacola along about then, into a rented house on East Strong Street, directly across from the house at 1317 E. Strong Street that came up for sale in the middle teens of the twentieth century. My grandfather bought it, and Mama remembered, I've recalled this here before, family and neighbors moving their belongings across the street into the house where Mama grew up, and that I knew and loved as my grandparents' house all my growing up years.

Sold long ago when my grandparents moved to a smaller single-story house way out 12th Avenue toward the hospital, the house at 1317 is still there, was totally renovated some years ago, and sold again, but still looks the same to me. That's the same sidewalk where I learned to roller-skate when we did not have sidewalks in the Cove in Panama City. And down the driveway, those are the same steps up to the kitchen door that, no doubt, helped my aging grandparents realize the house was no longer safe for them. Linda and I are now way older than they were at that Time!

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Rambling, having fun rambling and remembering. That was the house, too, where I got my first bike for Christmas. The second story, which shows in the picture, was added over the kitchen, and back bedroom about 1939, after my Uncle Wilbur's wife Margaret died, and Wilbur with his two children, my first cousins Margaret Ann and Bill, moved back in with my grandparents. July 1939, Margaret was four, Bill was two, and I was nearly four and staying there with them at the Time while Mama was here in Panama City giving birth to my brother Walt. Walter Gentry Weller, he's named for our grandfather Walter Gentry.

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Happy birthday, Mama! Many happy memories.

Bubba