She smiled and looked as happy as she had ever been. Two days before she died, I sat with her in her bedroom and saw a heavenly light illuminate her. Things about her life growing up, about meeting my Dad, about getting married, about having a family, about enduring my father’s illness that took him far too soon, and about how that hit her at age 43, with two daughters still at home. She had many things she wished to discuss with me. In that last year I spent time with her each week talking. She was ready to go when her time came, and I was ready to let go of her when it happened. With her I got to have plenty of time to see death coming, and I was not cheated by losing her too soon. She would not pass away until 2014, when she was 85. Sometimes he would come to me as the father of my school years. Sometimes he would be the young father I knew as a small child. I always felt cheated that he died so young, cheated that when I had become a successful young man, he was taken from me and I was denied his company for all these years. Thinking of those times makes me realize once again how hard my parents worked to give us more than they had growing up.ĭaddy passed away in 1971 when he was 45 and I was but 22. Eating that ambrosia was a little bit of heaven for him and for us. It was a delicious fruit cocktail adorned with coconut and pecans and cherries. We had a large clear glass bowl and he would fill it to the brim with his ambrosia. He would also buy fruit because they got to have fruit, too, in their childhood holidays.ĭaddy made a divine bowl of ambrosia. Every holiday season Daddy would buy a large assortment of nuts, which we would crack and eat. Chief among those foods were fruit and nuts. For him Christmas and Thanksgiving were reminders that in those times his greatest joy was food not eaten the rest of the year. Both my parents grew up poor in the Great Depression, but his family had life especially hard. The other specific memory was of Daddy and his ambrosia he made every Thanksgiving. They would cook to perfection and I would eat my fill of them, sopping up giblet gravy and devouring it, along with the rest of the feast of turkey and other dishes. They would fill the room with their pleasant, enticing smell. They would sit in a large bowl with a hand towel draped over them waiting until the time was right to cook them. One was of Mama making yeast rising rolls. During Thanksgiving I had remarked to others that my memories of Thanksgiving as a child brought back two very specific memories.

It was a Saturday afternoon a week after Thanksgiving. Occasionally, she pays me a visit in my dreams.

It has been ten years since Mama passed away.

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