As I write the last hours of Christmas Day are coming to a close. The trees are bare, finally. And it feels really cold, but the thermometer says it’s only 55. It has not been an ordinary day this year as in past years.

This year my Aunt Bam (Lessie Rae Taylor) died a few days before Christmas. She would have been 88 years old on March 8th. She was the second of Archie and Minnie Corley’s six children. Only Weldon and George remain.

Of the six children Corene, Lessie Rae, and George stayed on the family farm acquired through a grant from George III to Frederick Gable in the 1750s. The Corleys obtained the farm by marriage. Lawrence Emanuel married Julia Ann Gable. Many more cousins have since returned to the homestead which has been handed down for generations.

Older generations keep a family history. Aunt Bam, one of the keepers, kept us informed in Midway Community. I often called on her for information. I asked about her childhood and Grandma and Grandpa in the Midway Community. She most likely had a picture to go along with her story. She often said when her time came she wanted her funeral to be a happy one.

And, as she wished, her funeral did leave people happy and hopeful about this life and the one to come.

Aunt Bam had many nicknames earned over a lifetime. Her life was not always easy, but she found satisfaction in her family, her church, and everyone she befriended.

She learned to drive on a tractor and was the first of the children to drive the family T-Model. Maybe that’s why Weldon married a former WWII RAF driver: he saw a little of his older sister in Virginia. It took a special kind of woman to drive in those years, let alone driving a stick shift like you were chasing demons. I think Bam was about 16 then.

Aunt Bam was active right up until her last short illness. How ironic one of her nicknames was the Pilgrim “Uber” driver. If anyone in the congregation needed a ride to the doctor’s, church, store, she was there for them.