What is notable about Edna is that, throughout her life, Edna struggled with poverty and Edna
somehow managed to be a romantic.  Perhaps she needed her sense of romance in order to stay
hopeful and to survive.  She loved to have a significant man in her life, loved reading good books and
enjoyed travel.

Her greatest personal frustration was untimely deaths of  loved ones.  Both of her parents died in
close succession when Edna was in her mid-teens.  At this time Edna was a romantic teenager who
dreamed that a "knight in shining armor" would rescue her.  She had been eyeing a local single man
older than herself, Sam Compton.  Sam was a millworker and earned a salary.  A marriage was
quickly arranged because Edna was considered too old to go into the Georgia Baptist Orphans'
Home in Hapeville, Georgia.  What, in fact, resulted was that Edna joined Sam in his own struggle
with unremitting poverty.  They had four babies in rapid succession.  Then Sam and the baby Patricia
died from tuberculosis.  By the time she was 24, Edna was a young widow with three toddlers and
no resources.

So Edna placed her two daughters in a orphanage and was aided by her sister Winnie to get
beautician's training in order to be able to earn a small living (barely) wage.  She moved to the largest
nearby city, Macon, Georgia, and began her lifelong cycle of renting a bedroom in someone's home.
Edna never had her own home.

Actually Edna was quite pretty --the Wood girls were famous for their beautiful Irish eyes, plus
Edna's hairdressing skills made her present herself well.  World War II came, and Middle Georgia
experienced an influx of soldiers.  Edna began dating.  Soon Edna-the-romantic was
head-over-heels in love with a soldier named Tony.  Tony was, by heritage, Italian and a Catholic
and a Yankee to boot, not like anyone Edna had ever known.  She wanted to marry him, so she
took instruction and made a serious conversion to Catholicism, remaining faithful to that church and
going to Confession for most of her life.  But Tony shipped out to war, never wrote and never
re-entered her life.  When he was gone and she realized he was gone for good, Edna became
despondent.

An aside is needed because Edna's story has such impact on the story each of her children would
later tell about their own lives.  Edna made a hurtful mistake during her courtship with Tony.  One
weekend when daughters Frances and Dixie were on leave from the orphanage to visit her, Edna
introduced her daughters to Tony as her "little sisters".  Frances never got over that -- it was a
wound until the day she died.  She felt such rejection from her mother.  It also didn't help that Edna
kept her son, Griffin, not placing him into the orphanage.  During the "Tony/Catholic conversion
period" of her life, Edna placed Griffin into a Catholic boy's boarding school in Alabama, and
struggled to make payments on his tuition.

Griffin graduated from that Catholic boarding school and then joined the Army.  While stationed in
Germany, Griffin married Charlotte, a German girl.  They have four lovely daughters (one of whom is
presently a missionary in Poland).  Griffin died prematurely in his middle age from a brain tumor.

Edna's oldest daughter Frances married  Clinton, a serviceman who was a gruff, grumpy cheapsake.
They lived all over the world at his various assignments, finally retiring to Titusville, Florida where
Clinton was employed at nearby Kennedy Space Center/Cape Canaveral.  Frances and Clinton
ended up with what appeared to be a loveless marriage arrangement. Their marriage yielded two
sons, one of whom earned a Ph.D. and works as a school superintendent and the other who is an
ex-Marine now making an excellent living in his own computer consultation business.  This youngest
son is extremely devout and has purchased beautiful mountain acreage with plans to found a church
camp.

Edna's daughter Dixie went to Hawaii shortly after Pearl Harbor was bombed and worked there as
part of the U.S.defense effort.  There she met and married "Brownie", a soldier whose family owned
a large, prosperous orange grove business in California.  They never had children.  At present, Dixie
is a widow and a California millionaire.  She generously "mothers" her nieces, Griffin's daughters.

But back to Edna's stories.  After Edna's dreams regarding Tony turned to ashes, she was in such a
deep depression that I became concerned and brought her to visit me at my home in Perry, Georgia.
She was so immobilized by her depression that I took her to my doctor, seeking medical help.  He
told me that he would sign for her to be placed into the State Hospital in Milledgeville.  I loved Edna
enough to help her avoid that: Edna ended up living with my family in my home for one year.
Gradually she came out of the depression.  She finally decided to move back to Macon to work
again as a beautician.  She asked my husband if he could make a small loan to her until she was able
to make a paycheck.  In truth we could not afford to do this, but we did it anyway.  The next month,
she rode the bus to Perry and paid us back that money.

Most of the remainder of Edna's life can be described as periods of Edna working as a beautician in
Macon while living in rented bedrooms, alternating with periods of Edna trying unsuccessfully to live
with Clinton and Frances, or Griffin and Charlotte, to help them with childcare, or of Edna taking
long "respite visits" in Perry with me and my family or in Jonesboro with our brother Robert.
Eventually her goal in life became to qualify for medical retirement so she could receive a little check
and avoid standing on her feet all day serving customers whom she was too deaf to hear.

Clinton had zero sympathy/empathy for Edna.  Clinton would tell horrible "mother-in-law" jokes and
stories.  Frances found her relationship with her mother to be a source of pain and frustration --
resolution to her grief over desertion was never achieved.

Even in my household Edna became, behind her back, a source of some joking to help us tolerate
her intrusions, her severe deafness, and her dramatic diabetes (complete with public injections and
well-timed fainting spells).  But my husband is very kind and regarded her circumstances with
compassion.

And Edna never quite gave up on her notion of being saved by a knight in shining armor.  In her 50's
she married Mr. Johns, who then turned her into a maid while he spent his days reading stock
reports.  The first living arrangement he made for them was an apartment in a gorgeous
white-columned mansion in the grand old section of Macon's College Street.  The catch was that
they got the apartment rent-free in return for my white-haired, medically challenged sister cleaning
that large house.  Edna was flabbergasted that Mr. Johns did this to her.  Then he made an
arrangement to manage a motel in nearby Gray, Georgia, whereby he would sit in the office and rent
the rooms while she cleaned the rooms.  It was too much for her.  She called my husband me to
come get her.  A divorce followed; she even arranged to legally drop the name "Johns".  Back she
went to beautician's work.

When she was finally able to retire, Edna moved to Florida to be near Frances and Clinton (groan).
Here in retirement-land, she met an elderly man named Pat Graves.  Pat had the filthiest mouth of
any person I have encountered.  He also told the most awful and embarrassing jokes.  We figured
that the only way Edna could abide to be in his vicinity was that she was too deaf to hear him.  And
she was indeed deaf as a post, graciously existing in her own little world, missing the vast majority of
what was said.  She loved nasty old Pat Graves and managed to have a good twilight marriage to
him.  He loved her and was good to her.  He stood by her and cared for her in her last illness when
she died with breast cancer (--followed by Pat propositioning Frances within a short time after
Edna's death).

If my memories of my brothers and sisters were to be selected for display like a gallery exhibition,
the one story I would choose to "hang" to represent Edna is the grove spraying story. Her son-in-law
Clinton told this with laughter, but it was heard by me with tears.  It is poignant.  Clinton had been
transferred to New Mexico.  They had a housing assignment on the base.  Clinton said, "Damn if my
mother-in-law didn't arrive before my furniture did!"  Edna moved in with them and decided that she
would provide cooking and childcare, thus enabling Frances to get a job and bring in another
paycheck.  Frances told her mother, "No! And don't tell me what to do!" so emphatically in an
argument that the wind was figuratively knocked out of Edna.  Edna walked out of the house into a
fruit orchard that was behind base housing.  Somewhere in the orchard she climbed a tree and spent
the afternoon hugging it.  Hours and hours passed.  Late in the afternoon a crop duster came and
dumped a cloud of poisonous powdered chemical on this orchard.  Edna fled from her tree refuge,
and finally came back to Frances's and Clinton's house sputtering and reeking pesticide.  She got her
pocketbook and left with only the clothes on her back.  She walked to the bus station and  rode a
bus cross-country to Georgia, arriving with no money.  Another passenger had pity on her, was very
concerned about her, and got his family who met him in Macon to give Edna a ride to Perry.  She
arrived at my door whipped and drained.  We had to telephone Clinton to find out what was going
on.  The indignity of that cropdusting bespeaks how life kept "goosing her" when she was down.

Last, the story of Edna's death -- at the end as Edna died from metastasized cancer, she was out of
her head, calling people from her past and talking of long-past events.  Frances was there, beside her
hospital bed.  Frances told me, "She never called her children, and never talked about us.  But she
went on and on about Sam and Tony!"  Frances was deeply hurt that she was not mentioned in her
mother's deathbed rantings.