FOR MOST OF THE CENTURY: GOODBYE TO MAMA (COLUMN 44)

Jean Bell Mosley's new autobiography, "For Most of the Century," is only available in serialized form in the Southeast Missourian. Return each week for her continuing story.

After Dad died, Mama stayed for a while alone, at their white frame house on Columbia Street in Farmington. In their late years, both Mama and Dad worked at the Mental Institution in Farmington, known as No. 4, and they had made their residence either on the grounds of the hospital or later at this location on Columbia Street.

Mama, all her life had been surrounded by abundant family members so she found it very lonesome living alone. When her elder, spinster sister, Minnie Casey, who lived in Oakland, Calif., begged her to come stay with her for a while, Mama went, making the long train trip by herself.

Aunt Minnie lived a very Spartan life and when Mama came back to Missouri for a visit, after two years, she was very thin. I hated to see her go back to California but she had promised Aunt Minnie to come back, and back she went.

During this second stay she had an emergency glaucoma operation. This, together with seemingly inevitable cataracts, dimmed her vision considerably. She thought it time to come home for good and so did Lillian, Lucille and I.

Mama paid to have the second story of Lucille's home in Farmington made into an apartment and there she lived for a while. Then she began dividing her time, staying at Lillian's and with me, maybe for a couple of months at a time.

Edward and I had already made the screened porch on the south side of the house into a downstairs room for Stephen. By this time Stephen was away teaching school so Mama took that room.

While staying with me, she suffered her first heart attack, a rather massive one, and thereafter suffered angina pains the rest of her life.

While staying with Lillian, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and never regained consciousness although she was at the Farmington Community Hospital for several days before her death.

On the day of the hemorrhage, Lillian, in another room, heard Mama go to the bathroom and come back to sit in her favorite chair. When Mama failed to respond to something Lillian said, Lillian went to investigate and found Mama sitting in the chair, unconscious, her dress neatly arranged and her cane hanging over the arm of the chair. Mama was gone, she of the "two orange ice-cream sodas, please," she who spoke the word, murmuring, like the deep strains of a cello, she who re-wove a tear in a coat sleeve with some strands of her long black hair. She was 85. She is buried alongside Dad at the Farmington Memorial Gardens Cemetery.

In addition to the above mentioned memories, and amongst the hundreds of others, there was the brown, acorn, butterfly dress.

When I was putting together my trousseau, Mama said, "Now you'll have to have a new house dress."

Note "a" house dress, not four or five. It was the pits of the Depression. To use the word trousseau is almost laughable.

Mama wisely knew that the majority of a 1930s housewife's days were going to be spent in house dresses -- a house dress. Breakfast, dinner and supper, your new husband was going to look across the table and very likely see you in the same dress.

We consulted the Sears Roebuck catalog.

At that time, Sears sold dress fabrics and had little swatches of the cotton, voile, bastiste, etc., glued into the catalog so you wouldn't be ordering a pig in a poke.

Slacks had not yet come into fashion, nor the later habit of changing dresses every day.

A house dress, if of the proper color, could be worn for three days without washing, starching, ironing and putting it on again, fresh.

We fingered all the swatches, thought of any trim we might already have in the scrap bag or any that might be salvaged from other almost worn out clothes.

After much deliberation I chose a brown cotton print that had little, yellowish acorns in it. At that time, I could have identified acorns from the white, red, black, post and burr oak trees. We had them all on our home place, and I knew where they were.

So, perhaps that's why I chose this particular fabric.

"Now you must have pockets," Mama said and I agreed. I have always disliked garments without pockets.

"Buttoned down the front," I suggested, remembering some yellow buttons I'd seen in the button box.

I think pinafore ruffles at the sleeve-shoulder seams would be nice, Mama planned.

"What's that?"

Mama drew a picture and I liked it a lot. I thought I would look sort of a butterfly-like and said so.

We talked about butterflies as we cut and shaped.

Would they look like the brown fritillary or the painted lady ones that came to flit around our summertime zinnias? Oh, it was so good to plan and work with Mama.

"I'd like yellow rickrack around the pinafore ruffles," I suggested. Mama didn't say anything and I knew she was wondering if we ought to afford that.

"The ruffles will have to be starched and ironed," Mama warned.

"And we'll need a wide hem so it can be let up and down as the fashion changes," she added. I knew that. The dress was to last and last. My hems had gone up and down since the sixth grade.

We worked on that dress as some mothers and daughters would work on a bridal gown. After all, a bridal gown was worn once, the everyday dress would go on and on.

It did and every time I ironed it, the brown dye in the fabric exuded a crushed acorn odor. Serendipity!

With the passing of Mama, Edward and I were now both bereft of parents. His father, Edgar Scott Mosley, who had helped build our house, indeed, did all the carpentry work and who delighted, later, to work in our big garden, died in 1953. He was a big man of few words.

Edward's mother, Ruth Parthena (Curd), often playfully called R.P., passed away in 1956. They were both gentle people, not easily disturbed by anything, perhaps because they had already put many hard years behind them before coming to Cape Girardeau to live at 501 Themis Street.

Mr. Mosley, in the late 1890s and early 1900s had helped clear the swamps of Southeast Missouri to make it the rich farming land that it is today. Rich people reaped the rewards of the hard work, buying up the land as soon as it was cleared.

Now, late in this century, there is a movement in conservation circles and other organizations to return more wet lands to their original state. So it goes. Something that seems good at the time is found, in later years, to be something not so good, all things considered, like wildlife.

Clearing the swamps was a dirty, dangerous business. Sometimes roughnecks were employed to, hip deep in black muck, cut down the trees and rid the stumps, fighting mosquitoes and snakes all the while.

Mrs. Mosley often told of the time when she almost shot her husband, Edward's father (before Edward was born), through the locked door of her home, thinking it was one of the roughnecks who had come at an odd hour when her husband was not at home.

Through it all, they raised four children to adults, Sylvester, Juel, Edward and Bernice. Three more children died in infancy or while still very young.

While Mr. Mosley did his carpentry work, Mrs. Mosley kept room-and-boarders at the gracious white frame house with seven bedrooms. When she got a few dollars ahead she would buy something pretty -- a lace collar, a brooch, a pretty dish which revealed the feminine longings beneath her workaday world. I have some of these "whims," four milk glass salad plates, a blue vase, a flow blue teapot.

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.