Everyone feels his or her mother is special, and she is. Some are better cooks than others, some are enthusiastic when their children play sports, some even play sports with the kids, some are skinny and some aren’t. The list could go on forever, but the main thing is that each is a mother.
In this column, I would like to honor one of the most unique women I have ever known, and by honoring her, I applaud mothers everywhere and in all walks of life.
In her life, this woman wasn’t a well known person. The media never chased her around trying to find out tidbits about her life. Most of the world would say she was not one of the important people.
However, her family will tell you that Hilda C. Varney was one of the most important people in the world. She was my mother, and I am only now really appreciating the tremendous impact she had on my family’s world.
Granny, as even her children called her, was a 5 foot 2 inch bundle of energy. Even as she grew older and had breathing problems, she bustled around the best she could. Not one to keep her ideas to herself, she became bolder as she aged. She often said, “The older I get, the more I can get by with.”
However, what she said was never as outrageous as some of the things she did. We all affectionately called her a monkey because she was continually doing things to make us laugh—not always intentionally. Another reason she was a “monkey” to her family is because she had long arms.
Before you think this is a bad thing, let me explain that her arms were not so long that they looked disproportional, but to be a short person, mother could reach nearly anything in her cabinets. Although she couldn’t reach the back of the top shelves, she could get things from the front of the shelf. I often lamented that I didn’t inherit her long arms.
Growing up was not easy for mother. When she was just a baby, her father was working in another town and was supposed to come home and get his wife and baby that weekend and take them back with him. He came home from work late one night, and the man who ran the boarding house mistook him for someone who was breaking in and shot him.
Her mother remarried, and over the years, mother gained 8 half brothers and sisters. Like a lot of girls in those days, she was expected to stay home from school and help with the younger children when it came washing day or time to plant crops. She only went to the 8th grade, but after reading some of the letters she wrote to me, I realized that mother was a very intelligent person.
When mother was around 12, her stepfather was one of the miners involved in unionizing the coal mines around Matewan, West Virginia. For two years, her family lived in a big tent because the union miners had been put out of their homes. Of course, she didn’t realize everything that was going on in the world around her, but she did remember that her stepfather and his buddies would get behind some rocks and shoot at the other union miners across the river making them think it was mine agents who were shooting at them. Then, they would laugh about it.
I don’t know why mother chose this as one of the things to remember, but she always thought that was the silliest thing to do, and I imagine that is why it stayed in her mind.
Mother was always a proud person. Later on, after she started going to church, she would always say that it was a wonder God didn’t let lightning strike her because of her prideful ways. She used to laugh and tell the story about her coat.
The story reminds me so much of Dolly Parton’s coat of many colors. Mother’s family, like many others of the time, didn’t have much money. One winter, her mother made her a coat by altering a larger hand me down. It had a lot of colors in it. The way she described it, it could be right in style today, but it wasn’t the style back then, and mother was ashamed of it. However, she wouldn’t hurt her mother’s feelings by telling her this.
She put the coat on and set out on her way to school. When she saw someone approaching, even though it was the middle of winter, she took her coat off and carried it over her arm. She remembered one man whom she thought looked at her funny because she was carrying her coat. She thought she should offer him an explanation, so she told him she had a new coat and didn’t want to get it dirty.
Her name was another “pride” thing with mother. Her actual birth name was Hilda Eliza Chafins. She wrote her name as Hilda Elizabeth Chafins because she was afraid people would call her Lizy (PRONOUNCED WITH A LONG I.). Even her children didn’t know what her real name was for a long time.
When mother was almost 18, her mother was tragically killed. As she put some coal in the fireplace, something, which was later thought to be a blasting cap, blew up and hit her. She was holding her six month old baby at the time. She looked at her hand which was covered with blood, said, “My baby has been hit with something,” and went over to the bed where she laid the baby down. She then lay down beside the baby and died. She was the one who was hit, but the baby was uninjured.
After her mother’s death, mother went to live with some neighbors until she could decide what to do with her life. Her step father tried to keep the other children with help from his mother, but six months later he was hurt in the mines and died. Mother had to endure seeing all of her step brothers’ and sisters’ being sent to orphanages or adopted out to other families. She had always taken care of the two younger girls and loved the baby as though it were hers. She said the day they put them on the train to take them to other families was one of the days in her life that her heart broke.
She lost track of all of her siblings until she was 80 years old. The baby girl tracked her down and had also found another half-sister living in Indiana and a half-brother living in Texas. The three girls were reunited, and the Lewisburg newspaper ran a story about it. The brother was in ill health, but mother got to talk to him.
Not long after she went to live with the neighbors, mother met her future husband at a funeral. They got married, and, according to her, the best part of her life began. Mother always said that no matter what she had to go through to get to where she was, her children were worth the effort. She loved them dearly, and this love didn’t stop there. It transferred to her grandchildren as well. She loved us all with the unconditional love that only a child recognizes.
Mother didn’t just love her own children. She loved all children—even the mean ones. She was our church’s nursery teacher on Sundays for 26 years and the children who came to her class remember her fondly. She always had a story to tell about her “kids” as she called them. She even loved Sammy Jones (not his real name because he is now a teacher in the Mingo County School System).
One year, she taught Sammy’s class in Bible School, and the lesson that morning was about David and Goliath, the giant he defeated. After the story, the children were supposed to make David and Goliath out of modeling clay. Sammy’s Goliath stood about 6 inches tall, but granny noticed that he had three legs. Thinking Sammy had put the extra leg on so Goliath could stand up, mother complemented him on his idea. Sammy quickly informed her that was not so Goliath could stand up and proceeded to tell her that, since Goliath was a giant, he figured everything was big, so he added that to HIS model.
This was back in the fifties when people were modest. Years later, mother laughed at herself and said she didn’t think her mouth closed for 5 minutes. She didn’t know what to say, so she just kept walking around the table looking at the other children’s models and hoping no one else thought to ask Sammy about his creation.
—Next week’s column will be Part II of the column.
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