Sleeping at the foot of the bed

Sometimes it takes a new perspective to see the thing that has been right there all the time. And even though Mama Love is 93-years-old, it took sleeping at the foot of the bed for her to see something that had always been there for the first time.

It was a cool spring night when Mama Love decided to change her sleeping position on a quest to soothe the tired bones that have served her body for the last nine decades. The next morning as the sun rose over the Metro East property her family owns, she delighted to see out of her window a blossoming tree in the distance. High above the green tree tops rose the tallest tree sprouting white spring flowers.

“Ha! Now I thought, I’ve been in this house for at least 70 years and I have never seen that tree,” Mama Love marveled when she relayed the story. “And all it took was sleeping at the foot of the bed. We might not like it, but we all need a little change now and then you know. You never know what you might discover.”

Mama Love knows about change. When she was born, women couldn’t vote. When she grew up in the Southern Illinois community just outside of St. Louis, black kids didn’t swim in the city pool or watch movies on the main floor of the local theater. Water hoses and balconies would have to do. And most kids in her community didn’t go to high school. But not Mama Love. She was one of the first African-American graduates of her integrated high school. Even though she knew a high school education wasn’t going to let her work at the phone company or local drug store like her classmates. A high school education was not going to save Mama Love from a lifetime of being “the help.” For more than six decades, she spent her life going to white people’s homes to cook their food, clean their homes and wash their clothes. Then she went home and did the same thing for her own family.  

But Mama Love has always been a believer of change. When her kids’ white friends asked her why her kids couldn’t go swimming, she decided to integrate the pools. When her educated and successful children grew up and weren’t allowed to live in certain parts of town, she used her connections to mobilize the community and sparked a fair housing movement. But the biggest legacy of change in her life is that despite the fact that she never took one college course, she made sure all three of her children got bachelors and masters degrees. Education paid for one dirty dish at a time.

Change, Mama Love says, is why she’s still here when so many of her friends are gone, when her beloved husband of 62 years has been gone for more than a decade and when all of her own children are now eligible to collect Social Security. Change has been what has kept her spirit fresh and her mind active.

“But you got to have an open mind to see things,” she’ll tell you. “Just like that tree. Been here all this time. It didn’t change. I did.”

Then she pointed to another tree closer to her house and closer to her heart. The tall, thick tree rose majestically as it sat at the foot of her backyard deck. Its roots planted firmly in the family homestead.

“Now this tree, it hasn’t always been here,” she explains. “The boys planted it when they were kids. Of course that had to be close to 60 years ago. And look at it now, it’s still here.”

And that is one thing the mother of three, grandmother of seven and great-grandmother of five hopes will never change.