Mother's Day

Mary Nelle Grizzard was born on May 23, 1931. She was the first member of her family born at a hospital, and Doc Elliott, the Arnall Mills doctor, whose salary was paid by the mill employees' "doctor tax," drove into Newnan to deliver her.

Twenty years earlier, Nelle's maternal grandmother gave birth for the ninth time. When Doc Elliott arrived at the Smith house, Vennie and Charles acknowledged their difficulty naming the child. The doctor suggested "Nina," which in a Georgia accent was prounounced "NINE-uh." So began the life of Aunt Nina, my only known relative named for a number.

Maw Maw wanted Mother called "Mary Nelle," but after hearing the syllables merged into "Mernelle," my grandparents settled on Mother's middle name, and she became "Nelle" for the rest of her life, except to the government and an occasional uninformed nurse.

Sometime in infancy, Mother became very ill. As her fever raged, Doc Elliott came to the Grizzards' shotgun mill village home and tended her. He placed ice cubes all around her body in an attempt to cool her.

My mother had a great-aunt on her paternal grandmother's side, Frances Idonnia White, who was already a spinster by the time little Nelle lay suffering. Aunt "Donie," whom I remember from the last of her almost ninety years, had her own ideas about medicine. She roasted an onion in the fire and squeezed some of the juice into a baby's bottle.

Soon enough, the fever broke, and the child recovered. My Paw Paw's middle sister, Allie, always claimed Aunt Donie's home remedy, not Doc Elliott, saved my mother.

While I'll never know exactly what illness befell Mother or what restored her to health, I am still grateful -- on this Mother's Day nearly eighty years later -- for the doctor and for my spinster aunt. Soon, I will take my own wife, the mother of my four children, to a tasty brunch. When I return, I'll squeeze the juice from some blackberries I have boiled in a pot. Then, using only the juice, sugar, and the knowhow Aunt Allie gave me as a very young teen, I'll prepare a few jars of blackberry jelly.

Except that I'll do my cooking over an indoor stove, I'll use the very recipe Aunt Donie's mother used when she started housekeeping well over a century ago. The next time Alyse or I pull a pan of biscuits from the oven, we'll slather them with sweet, black gold prepared according to a recipe shared with me by the same elderly woman who told me of her own maiden aunt, a sick baby, a mill village doctor, and a roasted onion.