My mother, Marian Early McIntyre, was born one hundred years
ago today. She came into the world as the United States was about to enter the
First World War and left it seven weeks after the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001.
For twenty-four years she was the postmaster of Elizaville,
Kentucky 41037, a one-room, fourth-class office that was a local nexus. She saw
nearly everyone in town every day and knew what everyone was doing. (To live in
rural Kentucky in those days was to experience a level of surveillance
unmatched by the Soviet Union at the height of its power.)
She had a quick wit and a sharp tongue, the latter of which
I inherited from her, along with a regrettable tendency to indulge it. Her private smile appeared briefly when she was amused, as she
regularly was by slightly improper stories, and my sisters and I called the
glower when she was displeased “the camel look.”
On one occasion she heard that a local official had been
using an official vehicle to ferry voters to the polls on behalf of candidates
he favored, and she told other people. That official got wind of it, came to
the post office, confronted her, and demanded that she disclose whom she had
told. My mother, about five feet tall and slender, looked up at this beefy
figure, six feet tall and well over two hundred pounds, towering over her and
said, “Everybody I saw. And the ones I didn’t see I called and told.”
After Kathleen, the children, and I moved to Baltimore, we
returned to visit every summer at the farm she had inherited from her parents,
and there were the treats of my childhood: the country ham, the One True Fried
Chicken, and green beans and potatoes cooked on the stove all morning, a
transparent pie from Magee’s Bakery in Maysville. (She also made her powerful
bourbon balls twice a year, in December and February, for Jesus’ birthday and
mine.)
I recently came across a note from her, written on a Post
Office memo sheet on my first day at Michigan State in 1969. It promises to
write every day, encloses a check for laundry money and expenses, and wonders
what I am doing at that moment in the afternoon. Blissfully, youthfully obtuse
and preoccupied with new experiences, I did not recognize then and only now
belatedly realize that she was telling me she missed me.
She did not, after all, write every day, but I have a box
full of letters that I have not yet been able to put on the curb to be
transformed into cardboard. The texts of the letters themselves, innocuous,
quotidian, are not the message. The unstated meaning on every page is how much
she cared for me, how proud she was of me.
After the death of my father, she remained at the family farmhouse.
As her health got shakier, she had a companion in the evenings. But she stayed
on. She had one gentleman friend with whom she enjoyed going out to
restaurants, and I found at her funeral that she had most recently been dating
a man whom she had known in childhood at school. She lived on her own terms to
the end.
Her physical remains rest on a hillside in the Elizaville
Cemetery. You can turn from her grave and see the family farmhouse on another
hill in the distance, one look taking in the place where she spent her entre
life.
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The body is gone, but something of her survives in me.
Marian Early McIntyre with her parents, Lucien Lundy Early and Clara Rhodes Early
