Life can be interesting at any age. In our youth we strive to become an adult. It really is not until you are in your thirties that you become secure in the adult world. Then those years that follow we are secured and well grounded in that world. Each stage of our lives comes with benefits and drawbacks, but as I age I find that I can look at life almost like a kaleidoscope. Seeing several view points at once.
I no longer feel the urge to have to prove myself in the adult world, and suddenly I am approaching old age. I have barely acknowledged this as I have a active life among younger people. In fact I have trouble identifying with some people of my age group. The trick I find is to continue living without putting restrains on your life. The really neat thing is that you have experienced so much and lots of changes in the world.
As I look back I am amazed that I have both known and loved so many generations of my family and friends. I was blessed to have known two great grandmothers. We lived with my mother's parents and her grandmother,Viola Mae Spence Jones, my Gram. There were four generations living in one house. Everyone helped out. We would all sit around a large oval dining table for our meals. We would discuss all sorts of things. I would mostly listen to the adults. I remember being amazed that they could talk about things that were five or ten years before. I just could not imagine that they could remember something that seemed like ages past for me.
Gram was born toward the end of the Civil War. We heard stories about things that occurred on the family Plantation, Magnolia, in Currituck County NC. She told tales about what happen during the Civil War. I learn that my great grandfather George W. Jones, had two brothers that were killed at the battle of the Crater in Petersburg VA. Yankee soldiers arrived at Magnolia, before they arrived all the silver was lowered into the well. When they did come they desecrated the house ripping paintings and even using her mother's hairbrush leaving their hair as evidence. After the war, her beloved brother Leigh, (who I am named after) tried to hold the family estate together overworking. He died at age 23, more than likely from consumption.
My Father's grandmother lived on Warren Crescent in Norfolk, Va. Her name was Adelaide Warden Sykes. My Aunt Nell Sykes lived with her. I remember visiting and marveling at the conch shells that they had sitting around their fireplace. My Uncle Hubert Sykes had found these on the beach near his home on Willoughby Spit, across from the Naval Air Base.
Grandmother Sykes' family was relatively well off her older sister was sent away to college just after the Civil War when most Families in the South were impoverished. She married my great grandfather whose family owned a plantation in Princess Anne County. Unfortunately he lived the life of a country gentleman and in order to do so he sold off the family land. Aunt Nell told that the girls had a pet goose that would follow them around and bite at her braids. The girls would go to shows and look at magazines to find inspiration for their clothes, then they would go home and make their own dresses similar to what they had seen.
My grandfather Judd Walter Lewis was brought home to visit by one of the Sykes men hopping that he would be right for their sister Nell. Judd did take a liking to one of the fair ladies, but it was not to Nell, who was the right age for him but to Adelaide who was a little older. He was smitten by her beauty and charm. Nell loved another gentleman of whom the family did not approve. She never married. Aunt Nell was always there to help Adelaide with her three sons and a daughter born in her forties. She way out lived her sister and was like a grandmother to my brother and my cousins and myself. She lived to be at least 90.
Grand Daddy Lewis' father came to America from Whales. He managed to get a job as a fore man at a coal mine in Scranton PA. Even luckier he married his boss's daughter.
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