Plentiful Pillowcases

She made us these pillowcases with her sewing machine, all of her grandchildren.  Eighteen grandchildren, and we each got pillowcases -- two each.  She made sure we each got two, and sometimes a blanket or a smell-good bathset in a little basket.
She made sure each one of us got a present from her at Christmas time. 



And if you wanted a Christmas present you went to her house.  That's the way it was, as it should be.  And we, all of us, went.

So, we went there to open Christmas presents.  We went there and nowhere else to eat Thanksgiving dinner.  We shelled peas there at harvest time with buckets, bowls, paper sacks, sore thumbs, and great conversation.  We climbed up on the forbidden roof and picked our own switches, and got the spankings of our lives...we darted in and out to say hello, and to get hugs when we were running low.  That was where we went when we fell down running, fell from trees, or skinned our hides to hell and back, or when, as upstanding citizens, we needed to let her know that our cousins weren't obeying the bible.



Her house smelled of old wood and books and good cookin'.  It was nestled beneath the oaks and pines where mosquitoes and fleas thrived off of the many little legs and the huge amount of shade.  And there was plenty of land to run around on, plenty of trees to hide behind, plenty of room to form whatever exclusive cliques between ourselves and the other many cousins that ran around behind the same three-foot-high chain-link fence.  My three sisters, and I, and our mother, and my aunt and cousins all lived in houses within that freest of confines, with regular visits of cousins and other aunts.  And any adult physically present within the commune of that fence was allowed to whip us if we were misbehaving.  As it should have been.  And the matriarch of the Freest of Confines played the songs and sang the words of the first songs we ever heard on her organ.


I remember the sound of her playing it.  We all do.  We heard her sing about her love of the Lord as we learned to walk, and play. 

When she wasn't at home she was at church singing about her love for the Lord there, or driving the kids on her school bus.  We would listen for her bus and meet her at the end of her long dirt driveway at the road, and she would let us get on and ride down behind her house where she would park it.  What a magical place to be, on that bus when there were no other children on it.  Then she'd sweep the aisles of the bus, and sing about the Lord, and tell us to lift up our feet.

I see it now, the way she lived her entire life to teach us that through everything, through all of the work, and the heat, and the hard, through the times of confrontation, through hospitals and sickness, through all of the things that didn't work out, through happy Christmases and pillow cases, her life was this story of love, this list of the many songs to sing.


And now, years later, as we rest our heads on plentiful pillowcases, on everything she made, as we obtain our rest by way of the hands that loved us, we find that her love lives for eternity.


We rest our heads on her love, and continue her story.


Myra Lee Dorman Kelly

Birth:	Jul. 17, 1932 Dowagiac Cass County Michigan, USA
Death:	Aug. 23, 2012 Escambia County Florida, USA
Myralee Dorman Kelly joined her husband in heaven Thursday, August 23, after a courageous battle with lung cancer. Born in Dowagiac, Michigan, Myralee moved with her family to Florida at the age of nine. She graduated from Tate High School in 1950. Myralee was an active member of Oakhaven Baptist Church, was a pastor's wife, and for over 40 years, served as organist for several area churches. Myralee is preceded in death by her husband of 43 years, Joseph D. Kelly; her mother, Gwendolyn Dorman Hopkins; her father, Floyd Dorman; her brother, Billy Dorman; and her Sister, Freida Renfroe. She is survived by her daughters, Paulette Smith (Rex), Cynthia Watson (Donald), Kathryn Taylor (Ronald), and Vivian Cockrell (Billy); 18 grandchildren; 40 great-grandchildren; two sisters; Barbara Hawthorne (Donald) and Martha Emery (Kenneth); one brother, Bernie Dorman (Bonnie); sister-in-law, Evelyn Hines (Bill); numerous nieces and nephews, and good friends.