A Beautiful Love Story

Geneva and John in 1947

My parents were born in 1930, one year after the horrible stock market crash of 1929, so they grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s and then WWII. They lived in an agricultural community where hard work was valued more than a formal education. My mother's family was more successful financially than most others around them, and her father owned and farmed a section of land (over 600 acres). My father's family was poor. They ran a thresher machine, which provides a service to farmers, and there was never enough work to keep their large family fed properly. My father had ten brothers and three sisters, so I can imagine that the group of them just appeared as a blur. People have said that there were so many boys, it was hard to remember who was who. When my parents were around the age of ten or twelve, my mother remembers the first time she noticed my father separately from his brothers. She was sitting on her front porch, churning butter, and the Thresher Crew (my father's family) came walking down the road in front of her house. When my father noticed the pretty girl on the porch, he summoned up his courage and said, "why don't you bring me a glass of buttermilk?" (Be sure to read this part with a Texas accent.) And from the porch my mother answered, "why don't you come up here and get it yourself?" And that was the beginning of their Love Story. They went for walks and had long talks, and she said that when he would hold her hand in his, it sent a thrill through her body from head to toe.

When my father was a teenager, he would go as far as he had to go to find work. Sometimes he would have to hitch-hike for hundreds of miles until he could find a job plowing a field for fourteen hours a day for very little money. He would sleep in a tent and eat whatever he could find. Through those years, my father wrote letters to my mother. She mentioned those letters to me a couple of times and told me that it was fine with her if I read them, but I always declined because I felt that those letters were private and not for me. Yesterday I finally read some of them and realized that she probably wanted me to read them with her, but thought I was uninterested. Those letters revealed a side of him that I never knew. I knew my daddy as a good man, a hard worker, and very quiet. I would have described him as the strong, silent type. He just couldn't relate well to a house full of daughters and our hormones and emotional outbursts, so he did his best to work hard and provide well for us. He put himself through college after he married my mother, all while working a full-time job. As far as I know, he was the only one of his siblings with a college degree. There was no laziness or "quit" in him. Since my father's death 12 years ago, my mother never stopped missing him until her death on July 21, 2014. After reading his letters, I see how much he truly adored her as well.

It's like I had a front-row seat to a Beautiful Love Story. 

Geneva and John in 1997