A Daughter's Inheritance
A podcast that explores the complex, sometimes beautiful, sometimes painful relationships of mothers and daughters. Each episode host, Susan Seal, sits down with a daughter(s) whose mother has passed, and they explore the story of her mother as well as the complexities of their relationship and what it means to carry forward the inheritance that was passed down.
The podcast launched with 3 episodes the week of Mother's Day 2026. New episodes drop on the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays of each month.
A Daughter's Inheritance
Two to Tango: Lorene “Allie” Wright Clevinger
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In this episode of A Daughter's Inheritance, host Susan Seal talks with Dr. Donna Clevinger, professor and senior faculty fellow in Mississippi State's Shackouls Honors College, about the mother who shaped her life on and off the stage.
Donna shares memories of her mother, a spirited young woman who came of age in 1940s Virginia, met her husband-to-be at the YMCA, and was pulled out of pharmacy school the moment she got engaged. Two decades later, she went back to school for agriculture and landscape design.
At the heart of the episode is the story of two weathered white vases: a flower show entry that "had no movement", and the quiet grace with which Donna's mother turned disappointment into fuel for a whole new chapter.
A story about resilience, reinvention, and charting your own course.
Visit https://adaughtersinheritance.com
Mom could stand on her own two feet as well. And she really showed me what leadership and being a woman was all about even at that young age. My parents set a high bar for me, and I was fortunate enough to, no pressure. I mean, they didn't tell me to go into the arts. I mean, I could have had a drugstore if I wanted it. You know, I could have been an ag, but I was pulled into the arts, and I've never regretted it, and they were always supportive.
SPEAKER_01Hello everyone, and welcome to A Daughter's Inheritance. I am Susan Seal, your host, and I am joined today by Dr. Donna Clevinger. Welcome. I'm glad you're here.
SPEAKER_00I am so excited about being here with you this evening. So thank you.
SPEAKER_01Dr. Clevinger is a professor and senior faculty fellow in the Shackles Honors College here at Mississippi State. For those that are not at a university and understands all of our academic nomenclature, tell us a little bit about what that what do you do?
SPEAKER_00What do I do exactly right? Well, my home is the Shackles Honors College, which means I teach in the honors curriculum. I teach honor students only, and I teach everywhere from the core curriculum, such as the what we call Cursus Honorum, which is uh several classes having to do with great books, reading great books anyway from the classics all the way up to contemporary times. I also have created an arts in honors program that I'm very proud of. And this has to do with students who obviously are not majoring in the arts. Perhaps they're engineers or business or agriculture, maybe that's their major field that they are going into. But I provide an outlet in music, dance, and theater where we actually perform plays, do dances as well as jam out with uh musical instruments, activities throughout the year. So we open with our large uh play to honor our classics that have the individuals that have gone before us in Greek and Roman. So we go back to that time period and put on a Greek or Roman comedy or tragedy. So we get to put on togas and all kinds of costumes from that period, which is very, of course, wonderful at this time now that the Odyssey, the film is out. Right, right. Uh so we do a play, alternating years. So the first thing I go into auditions at the beginning of the semester to get a play together to perform before the very end of September. Okay. And then we have music for our fall jammers and dance, and then we do a radio show, and then we just go on and on. So it's an outlet for the students who have uh that side of life, even though they're not going to go into it as a profession.
SPEAKER_01So uh right now classes start in about a month. So you're gonna be busy after that.
SPEAKER_00Yes, ma'am, for the first month after a month, I certainly am, and I'm looking forward to it. This year's going to be a comedy with music, so we're going to have student musicians that are going to be performing at the same time. Of young actors are going to be on stage, perhaps never have been on stage before. That's fine. And of course, we will have to have dance in there as well.
SPEAKER_01Well, I'll have to make a point to be there.
SPEAKER_00Yes, please. All of this is so important because it is sort of the some of the ending of what my mom started with me oh so many years ago.
SPEAKER_01Being in the Honors College, our we share a business manager. Yes, we do. And she right now she's housed in our office full time because there's renovations going on. And so I've seen you in our building.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01And uh the other day you knocked on my door and you came in and you said, I saw your podcast in the newspaper and I love it and I want to be a part of it.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01What resonated with you?
SPEAKER_00Oh, well, I think it's just a beautiful story that you had immediately that you what your vision was for your podcast. Is now we're talking about daughters who are walking the talk about their mom and things that maybe material things, but items that they continue to take with them as they themselves have grown up with their mom and uh forward after that. And I have just come from a conference where my mom was being honored posthumously, so I had to give get up and give a few words about my mom. Of course, those few words lasted 20 minutes. I am not known for my brevity. So that got me thinking about my mom, and to me, a very special person. And I thought, well, you know, I could talk about some of the stories that I uh talked about when I was giving a speech about her and accepting the award. Um, so I just felt compelled. And of course, we had never met before. Right. And here I was just bursting into your office saying, I want to be on your podcast because I've got some stories to tell. And I'll never forget your expression because your eyes widened. You were certainly in the middle of doing something else, and I broke that concentration, but you were very kind and generous in allowing me to sit down with you and talk to you a little bit.
SPEAKER_01I am grateful that you did that, and I will encourage encourage other people just to come on in my office and and let's chat about your mom.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01One thing that has been really interesting to me, as I've had conversations on the podcast, and also it has spurred conversations outside the podcast, is I know my story, and I know so much about my mother. When she even she was a girl, I've heard stories. I know who her boyfriends were before she got married. Um, I know my grandmother uh and what she was like. I feel like I heard so many stories about my great-grandmother. I feel like I know her. I've been told so many times that I was like her. I have walked through cemeteries with my mother and her saying, This is your great-great-grandmother, and telling me about her. And so I just assume everybody's like that. Everybody knows all the stories. And as I've talked to people and in one of our uh recent podcasts also, I find that's not true for everybody.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01Uh some people have been like, you know, we didn't we didn't talk about that.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01Uh and I've had somebody else at the office say, We just my mother did not tell the stories and we don't ask. And so it's interesting, although there's a common thread, I think, that runs through the stories, they are also unique in so many different ways. Um and so with that, what do you know about the early years with your mom or her early years as a young woman and her relationship with her mother? Do you do you know a lot about that?
SPEAKER_00Well, I know that my mom was very close to her mom. And my mom looked like her mom. And I, as you see in the photographs I brought you today, I look like my mom. Uh, my mother had these beautiful, and I don't know if your listeners remember the actor by the name of Paul Newman, but he had those steel blue eyes, and that was my mother's eyes. And she uh was a very extrovert, very much an extrovert. She loved to play basketball, she loved being in a school play, she liked activities outside the house. And of course, at that time, and we're talking about the 40s here, the uh daughters would often stay inside with their mothers to learn about um, I guess the old term was home economics, how all of the um items that you're supposed to have to be a good wife and a good mother, which is fantastic. But my mom somehow sort of rebelled against that and didn't really want to learn all of that because it would be there someday for her to figure out. But on that day, she wanted to be the captain of her basketball team. She wanted to have the lead in the play. She had lots of girlfriends, she had lots of, well, I can't really say boyfriends because guess where the boys were during the early 40s? They were at war. So if you can imagine going to high school and seeing very few young men in the classroom, you get a sense of that particular time in my mom's life. And of course, that carried on to the university when mom um went to the medical college of Virginia. Of all things, she wanted to be a pharmacist. So an interesting fact was if my father had not enlisted, of course, to serve his country as a medic in the war, he had a major decision to make whether on his return to the states, if he was going to take a what they called refresher course, because after all, he was right in the middle of his studies at MCV. He just was taken away, as all young men were from their lives to go serve. If he had not taken that one year because of his mom telling him it might be good to stick around for another year when my dad really wanted to get out and do his thing, he stayed that one year. He would have never met my mom.
SPEAKER_01It's amazing how one little decision or one little choice can make such a big trajectory in our in our lives. Right. So women were accepted into pharmacy school?
SPEAKER_00Oh, yes, believe it or not. They were accepted into pharmacy school in the 40s, at least this particular school did. And uh she started her education, and then daddy met her. Now, can you believe this? Are we all ready to sing YMCA? Okay. He met my mom watching her play ping pong at the YMCA. And I'm not going to go any further with that story, but they met there and, of course, had their courtship and got engaged. Now, this is what the ladies of your listening audience is going to groan here. As soon as my grandfather, my mother's father, right, learned that she was engaged to be married. Guess what? She was brought back home. She could not continue her classes because she was going to be married. And married women at that time were not going to go to school. They were going to be at home to be a what they called homemaker, whatever that is. A homemaker and have children and be the wife, support her husband, and all this.
SPEAKER_01Well, my grandmother was a school teacher. Uh-huh. She taught in a little z schoolhouse that was also a church, and it's been my family's little community church. But she had to quit teaching school when she got married as well.
SPEAKER_00Yes. So in 1947, they got married, and it was a great day. It was a wonderful day. They got on the train and went to another town for their honeymoon. And my mother was a little bit nervous about the honeymoon. So Daddy supposedly went downstairs. I'm not going to tell you everything, but let me tell you what he did downstairs.
SPEAKER_01It's not that kind of podcast.
SPEAKER_00No, it's not that kind of podcast, but this is a really precious story because he bought my mom a teddy bear and he brought it back upstairs. That teddy bear my mother gave to me when I was a baby. Oh. And that teddy bear is still in my bedroom today.
SPEAKER_01And everybody says, oh.
SPEAKER_00Oh, everybody, oh. Of course, he looks a little different from all these decades, of course. And I do not sleep with the teddy bear, all right? But it is just a nice memory of my parents at that particular time. So, yes, I know a few things about my parents and how they got together. So if Daddy had not taken that refresher course, I would not be sitting here today doing your podcast because mommy probably would have found someone else.
SPEAKER_01They lived in Virginia their whole lives.
SPEAKER_00They were born and raised in Virginia. After they were married, Daddy had a pharmacy job and they uh moved around quite a bit as he was younger, uh, and then just starting out together, and then they finally uh settled. Mom, of course, then started to have family and things started to move forward. Then I came along. You see a picture here. I brought in a couple of pictures. You see mom's picture as a freshman at MCV when she was a young girl. And the other picture I will get to in a few moments when I tell you all yet another story about my wonderful, wonderful mom.
SPEAKER_01Well, and she was a beautiful young lady and and woman, a very striking feature.
SPEAKER_00Yes, yes. And you know, it was a natural when mother uh passed on, she still had maintained her beauty, not only with her beautiful eyes, but with her skin and certainly her personality.
SPEAKER_01After they got married, uh and she was the homemaker.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01Did she take to that okay at that time? Did she enjoy it or was that did she feel stifled?
SPEAKER_00Well, I mean, uh, here is a very active woman that had been active all of her life, and there just wasn't anything for her to do outside the house because she was not totally educated, although she had been to university college, and it wasn't anything about my dad that said, No, you can't work outside the house, nothing like that. It was just my mother had so many interests, but she loved my dad very much, and she did want to be uh a good wife and a good mother. And again, now we're in the 50s, so you can imagine the culture at that particular time. So it wouldn't take her very long to find her own trail uh shortly after that.
SPEAKER_01The other day I was listening to uh a podcast, uh Oprah's podcast, and she was talking about in 1997 there was a l a family who had lost their mother. The little girl was eleven years old. Their mother had gotten the diagnosis of lung cancer. Oh no. And they had a year to deal with it all. They decided they were gonna live it up. They were gonna go to all these trips, they were gonna get everything they could out of that year. They went to Disney World, they went on all these other trips. And Oprah asked the little girl, What was your favorite memory of you know all this travel and all these great things that you did? And she told a story about that her mother loved to eat Cheerios, and when she put her to bed, she said, Now, if you get up in the middle of the night and go down and eat Cheerios, wake me up. And so her mother did about two o'clock. She went in there, she woke her up, they went downstairs and had Cheerios together.
unknownWow.
SPEAKER_01That was her favorite memory. Oh and so it's amazing sometimes things that may seem simple, eating Cheerios together, right? Can have such a lasting impact on us. Uh, and I think it will, you know, that'll be something that for whatever reason stays with her. I think, you know, she's a mother and got children of her own. Are there some things like that that just may have seemed uh, you know, for somebody else looking out, may not seem so significant, but really was significant in your life and your relationship with your mother?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. The first one is probably uh one of my earliest, earliest memories of my mom when I was probably uh under five years old. And I thought my mother was tickling my legs. All right, she was rubbing my legs and keep and she kept repeating, you're going to dance one of these days, you're gonna walk proudly one of these days. And she kept rubbing my legs and sort of tickling my feet and making sure I was moving and squirming around. And I'd never understood, you know, what was this about? And so, of course, later in years I asked my mom, I said, what was this? And she said, Well, a polio was running rampant in our town, and it was striking our neighborhood. I wanted to move your legs and feet and your body and keep telling you about the great things that you were gonna do and walk and dance and move, because that's when doctors made house calls. And can you believe my doctor was named Dr. Fox? Okay. Dr. Fox in his black bag, and he went around and checked all the children, and I was luckily fine. Uh, we got through, evidently there were some of those tough nights that the parents and the children had to endure. And I was okay. Uh, we got through that, and so that's what mom was trying to instill is keep high.
SPEAKER_01Speaking it into existence.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, speaking it, speaking it so the bad disease wouldn't happen to her daughter. Unfortunately, one of my playmates down at the end of the road, the neighborhood, did get polio. And my mom used to visit his mom with me in tow. And I remember him in an iron lung. Uh, and we would talk and giggle and laugh. But that young man, that little boy, did grow up and was able to walk. And many, many years later, we remet and he and I did dance together. And even though he might not have walked as straight as other individuals, and maybe he didn't have the kind of posture that everybody else did, or the straight legs that most of us had, he still was very much a part of my life and his own life. He went on and and did wonderful things with his own life. So that is one of the earliest memories I had. Were you dancing?
SPEAKER_01Were you in dance classes or anything then? Or did that come later?
SPEAKER_00That was about the same time mother put me as a little girl in dance classes. And she would, I don't know how she did it because she's not, remember, she wasn't a great homemaker, okay? She kept a clean house, everything was spick and span, dusted, washed, cleaned, blah, blah. But somehow she was able to make my little dance costumes. So I would dance and I started dance lessons even before I was in school. That was very rewarding. The mother enjoyed it. And when we moved to another town, Daddy got another position, and so we moved to another town, and that town, mother, got in more involved with uh women's groups, and she got to meet the mothers of the other young girls and boys that took dance classes. But another way she got involved was through what we call the garden club. The garden club where you would go and you know talk about plants. And she didn't necessarily do it because she knew a lot about it. She did it really to have something to do with herself during the day and start her own garden. And that was a big hit in our family, was a garden. We had the vegetable gardens growing up. My father would come home and jerk on his outdoor clothes. And get them dirty out in the garden and get his hand in the dirt, and mama would do that. But this particular flower show I would like to share with your audiences because this was a big, a big change with me and also most importantly with my mom. She decided to enter, maybe I should say commit to a particular garden flower show contest. And the theme that year of the contest of the flower show was two to tango. Two to tango. Okay. Well, mother, as you see today, I brought a couple of vases, and they are white vases. They were happened to be wedding presents to mom when she got married. So we're looking at 15-year-old vases then, and they're all white and and sort of got some design at the top.
SPEAKER_01Kind of that ruffle around the edge.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, like a ruffled skirt. Thank you. I was trying to think of how to say that. But sort of a ruffled, and they're everywhere. I mean, if you go into an antique store or whatever, you'll see these. There's nothing special. But it's certainly, it certainly is to me. It is very special to me because she decided to use these faces. And remember the the styrofoam used to come in sheets. The styrofoam that you could get, what we call the five and dime, which is the forerunner of our Walmarts today and so forth. She would cut out circles. She cut out two circles. One was a little bit higher than the other, okay? It made a mess on our kitchen table. My father swore that he got that styrofoam in his underwear, but I am not going to go there. But I think he also teased my mom. But she had one vase a little bit higher than the other. She covered the styrofoam with wax from a Christmas candle and had the flowers of different colors sort of entwined together as if they were a couple dancing. And I, maybe as much as eight years old, perhaps, thought it was gorgeous. And I helped my mom, you know, and I watched her trim and cut. So everything was just perfect. And we I just knew mama was going to get the blue ribbon. And I was just so involved with that flower arrangement in these two, these two vases, which I can really see the the flowers in them right now, quite honestly. She put a lot of time. Oh, time and energy. She really got into this. And we put them there. We left, as with all the other participants in the contest. Was this a big city or small town? Yeah, it was a pretty, you know, it was a pretty big, you know, town just west of Roanoke, Virginia. Okay. And it was one of the burgs and the ville, Starkville, you know, like that. Sort of like a Starkville. So we went back to see what we what we got. And I broke away from my mama. Well, I was holding her hand. I broke away because I wanted to see it first. So I went there and saw, and everything got very quiet because I couldn't find a ribbon. I couldn't find any ribbon. No blue, no red, no green, no orange, no purple, nothing, no ribbon, not even, not even an honorable mention, Susan. Nothing. And I looked at mom and I said, the judge forgot to give you a ribbon, just as loud as I usually was. And mom said, Well, we didn't get anything this time. And I cut loose. I was not having it. I cried and cried and cried. And I looked at my mom for a moment, and I could see tears welled up in her eyes. They didn't fall down, but I saw on my mom's face how disappointed she was. I couldn't stand it. I could not stand it. And of course, uh on the on the uh judging sheet it said why she didn't get it, and it was because your dancing flowers have no movement. What did that mean? What did that mean? That meant my world was falling apart. My mom took defeat as a real lady, a real woman at that time. She was so gracious. I still to this day don't understand why she didn't cry as loud as I did, but she did not. But that moment of, shall I say, defeat did not define my mom. I saw my mom pull her stuff together, stand up straighter, and said, That's okay. She said, We will try again, and we will come back even better. Well, that translated quite honestly, Susan, in better meant she went back to school. She and my father had many conversations over the kitchen table about how much it would cost. They thought I was in bed fast asleep. I was eavesdropping, right? I was eavesdropping, but they had enough money for her to commute 20 years after she had to quit school. And this time she was going into the College of Agriculture, and she was going to learn about plants and about soil and how they grew and what plants were better here than there. She was studying with more intention and more conviction than she ever had before, and she loved it. She loved it. So, what did I inherit from my mom? I watched how she responded to defeat. That was just amazing. So in 1967, my father and I attended her undergraduate ceremonies when she got her diploma from Virginia Tech. In 1967, women were not allowed on campus except commuting. There were only 500 women that were on a Virginia Tech campus of 10,000 students that were men. Can you imagine my mom or any woman sitting in a classroom? And here she is, as you see in this other picture, late 30s, okay, with all 18 to 22-year-old young men. Did not did not she think that this was I'm back in high school all over again without the men? That worked.
SPEAKER_01Did she go back to school in order to, I want to go to school and then I want a career? Or did she go just for the sake of learning or in inspired by I I need to go learn more about plants because I just I want for my own enjoyment?
SPEAKER_00I think it went through several phases that you said. I think she went back, my opinion. I think she went back to learn more about it. Just for her own for her own gratification, for her own knowledge, for her own well-being. And she worked it so that I and my father were off to school and work before she left the house. And she got home. What do women do late in the afternoon? They fix dinner. She got home in time. She got home in time to fix dinner. And the university worked with her for this. That was wonderful. So then she she really liked it. And then it lay it ended into landscape design, which she ultimately graduated with. She was a landscape design artist. She designed plants as a landscaper for people's homes. So she started to have a career. And she designed library plants, you know, at the library, what's out front. Uh it just went on and on. For so many years after that, she designed other people's yards. And she loved every minute. And she has the, and I still have the tools of these landscaped artists way back when.
SPEAKER_01So what what kind of mother was she? I mean, we talked about the career and and those kind of things and what kind of wife she was, what kind of mother uh she was attentive.
SPEAKER_00She was always attentive. When I was a little girl after kindergarten and my younger grades, I would go home and mother and I would have what was called a tea party. We would have a tea party. It was really milk and cookies. And of course, I invited my stuffed animals to attend. Of course, my stuffed animals didn't want any milk and cookies, so that meant I got them all. And that's probably why I was a plump kid, okay, because I had too much milk and cookies. But my mother was very attentive. She was always making sure that I not only was a good young lady, but I also carried my parents' name. So anything I would do should not be an embarrassment to my family, which kept me in a world where I respected my parents. I respected that period that I was in. She listened to me and my needs, although I never got everything I wanted, but she made sure that I had what I needed. And my father too, of course.
SPEAKER_01Was she a was she a disciplinarian? Did she have high expectations? She had high expectations for it.
SPEAKER_00Yes, of course, she had high expectations, but we talked about it.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00And then my father would come home and then the three of us would talk about it. So we had many uh talkabout conversations throughout.
SPEAKER_01Some more stern than others.
SPEAKER_00Yes, some were a little bit, uh, shall we say, to the point. Uh, but a lot of it was just to make sure I understood the way they were thinking at the time. But they allowed me also to give my opinion on things and why it should be my way. And of course, um a lot of times there was freedom here. There was a lot of wiggle room as well. So, but I think the attentiveness, her resilience, uh, and and how to come back from a defeat, even though we don't think that the flower show and not getting the blue ribbon, and I will say she got plenty of blues in her life. Uh that again is like the Cheerios. It might not be very important to anyone else, but that showed me what she was really made of, even though she was wife and mother and tried to make sure that my father, you know, was prepared for his job and be supportive of him. Mom could stand on her own two feet as well. And she really showed me what leadership and being a woman was all about, even at that young age. Uh, we might not have had the best of this or the best of that, but I got wonderful skills from my mom that's helped me because, as you know, I continued my dance and I went through high school, college, junior college, big college, small college, whatever, three performing arts degrees in dance and in theater. I wanted to later on, uh I invited my mom to come to one of my dance concerts when I was in my career, and I dedicated a dance piece that I had choreographed and I danced in to my mom. And I called it to Totango 2. It was my way of honoring her and showing her that when a judge or life tells you that something, your flowers or whatever, has no movement, that you go make your own. And so that's what I did.
SPEAKER_01And I bet that dance had a lot of movement to it.
SPEAKER_00Oh, buddy, I was all over that stage. My mom cried and I cried, but it was a moment that only she and I really understood.
SPEAKER_01Sure. You mentioned that your dad teased your mom. Was there a lot of laughter in your house? Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00Yes, a lot of laughter, a lot of positive energy, a lot of um kidding each other.
SPEAKER_01A fun place to grow up.
SPEAKER_00And not hurtful. I don't have uh, luckily, I have no bad memories. Uh I don't have uh loud arguments ringing in my ears at night. I never saw my parents argue. Now I will say that sometimes things got a little quiet around the house, okay?
SPEAKER_01Quiet treatment. There was somebody else that said they had the quiet treatment, the silent silent treatment.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there was no any of that other yelling and screaming. Therefore, you know, as I grew up and that set a precedence for the way I treated others as well, with respect and honesty and integrity.
SPEAKER_01You've done some work with women in leadership. Yes. Is that right? Is was that kind of inspired by your mother as well?
SPEAKER_00Everything that has to do with leadership. My career was inspired by my mom. My parents set a high bar for me, and I was fortunate enough to no pressure. I mean, they didn't tell me to go into the arts. I mean, I could have had a drugstore if I wanted it. You know, I could have been an ag, but I was pulled into the arts, and I've never regretted it, and they were always supportive.
SPEAKER_01You mentioned to me uh in my office uh about the extension service. Uh and my mother uh was uh a 4-H program associate in the Extension Service. I worked in the Extension Service. Oh, so it's that's uh had been a big part of our life. I was in 4-H, my brother was in 4-H. What was your connection? Uh what was her connection?
SPEAKER_00My mother loved 4-H. See, that was part of landscape design architect ag at at uh Virginia Tech, and they of course have a wonderful program here at Mississippi State. But extension, see, that's where the real beauty lies, is because with 4-H and the extension, you reach out into the communities, you are there where the rubber meets the road. Right. You are there with these young students, getting them prepared for an exciting life in agriculture, helping your own community growing and developing in 4-H. My mother ended up being a secondary school teacher in earth science, just to have more parts to her career, I guess. And so she enjoyed the young uh students in the secondary school program, and she was a great supporter of the extension and farming and all different aspects of 4-H. So, as you know, I have honored my mother at her own school with uh scholarship, internship, and so forth in her name. So her legacy and her love of plants and agriculture and extension will continue on.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and my brother and I did the same for my mom here. So there's a connection there. I remember my mother and my grandmother were in the Mississippi Homemaker Volunteers, which is a an extension program. And I remember them doing flower shows, and I feel fairly sure there were some vases that look very similar to that. Of course. And we did, you know, June was dairy month. We had dairy cooking contest, you know, all the all the fun things.
SPEAKER_00Right, right. These are nothing special, but she made them special, and of course, in my eyes, anything that she did was wonderful, okay? So I'll be a little bodied.
SPEAKER_01So all these things that are wonderful. Uh was is there anything that she wasn't great at?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Oh my goodness. Mother came from a long line of non-cooks. Mother could not cook. Her worst day of the year was Thanksgiving, trying to get everything just right. And there are a lot of funny stories about my dad telling me, you know, the first couple of meals they had, or the first couple of years when they were married, like to starve to death. Because remember, we didn't have frozen foods then.
SPEAKER_01But she had all those vegetables she grew.
SPEAKER_00She had all the that didn't come later, you know, she hadn't figured that out yet. Of course, she grew into it, but see, her mother and her mother's mother didn't want to be wasteful in the kitchen. So to teach their, sorry, listeners, daughters how to cook, not the guys, the daughters how to cook. Sometimes there would be waste, of course. But mom uh had an older sister, so the sister was all about the cooking. So that let mom go out and do what she didn't have, she could do the other things she liked to do. Running around, having a good time, and enjoying life.
SPEAKER_01So, begs the question uh what kind of cook are you?
SPEAKER_00Terrible. I I'm I'm keeping that legacy going, okay?
SPEAKER_01You were honoring her through being a bad cook.
SPEAKER_00I am honoring her for getting everything out of a can or a box. Uh, I just uh the kitchen is not an exciting place because honestly, all of these women did work some way outside the house to bring in funds for the family. My grandmother on my father's side was in the second graduating class at Longwood College and she became a teacher in Virginia. And so I come from a long line of teachers.
SPEAKER_01Because your mother taught, also.
SPEAKER_00My mother taught. So, of course, when I was undergraduate trying to get my performing arts degree, my undergraduate degree, I, of course, was going to be a professional director. But my mom said, please go to the College of Education and get your teaching certificate. I said, Why? I am not going to be a teacher like all these other family women, and look what happened. Now I've got over 50 years in this. So um I did go, of course, and get my teaching certificate, and it was wonderful.
SPEAKER_01So let me ask you this question. With you being in the performing arts.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01If you were to create a play about your mother, what would the central theme be? Uh and how would you want people to feel when they walked out?
SPEAKER_00It would be about living your own life at any particular time in history. If you think about history, I just finished uh teaching. Um, one nice thing about teaching in the honors college is you can come up with a variety of different courses. And I have what's called seminar in fine arts. And every time I teach that class, I tweak it a little bit and have a new course. This past uh spring, I taught seminar in fine arts, women living on the edge and those that love them. Yes, and that course traced outstanding women or women of note all through history, beginning early on, of course, with the Greeks and the Romans and all the way up to today. But the key was they had to have been written about, sung about, danced about, or performed about. So you think these women all had to have something written about them. So a poem might have been written about them. We've got musicals, have we not, about certain women. So it could be anything along those lines having to do with maybe living outside your time period to find the strength within to come back from adversity, from pain, and be able to chart your own course the way you want to write. It not how somebody wants to write it for you. And that would be probably it would be obviously an upbeat, uh, an upbeat play. I'm not gonna say it would be a musical or not. My mother, which I also inherited, did not have a very good singing voice. One of the last things my mother told me as she was leaving this world, is she patted me on my arm and she kissed my cheek and she told me not to worry that she would soon be singing with the angels. And that was a big deal for her to say because she knew that she would finally have that singing voice that she never really got while she was here on earth. So I will hopefully join that chorus one day because I too, like I said, inherited mother's non-singing, like cooking, and I too might join that same choir.
SPEAKER_01People would leave feeling joyous.
SPEAKER_00Joyous and motivated.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00Motivated and maybe feeling like they could pat themselves on the back that, hey, I'm doing okay. Yeah, I got hit in the stomach, I I got hurt, I got things done to me that were not fair by my definition of what fairness is. But I was able to pull myself back up, find my own trail that worked for me, to figure out how I could better to be a better human, to to be able to serve and to give in my own way to our great, you know, our great society. So I think that's what people would leave with, knowing that they too could could be able to make a difference. Honestly, and something they could just do for themselves without feeling selfish about it.
SPEAKER_01Thank you.
SPEAKER_00This has been great, hasn't it?
SPEAKER_01Yes, I have so enjoyed hearing your stories and uh so appreciate you bringing the vases and the pictures, and we will we will share those so our listeners can see those as well.
SPEAKER_00Fantastic.
SPEAKER_01I really do uh come knock on my door anytime.
SPEAKER_00Well, I'm telling you, just keep opening it for me, okay? And uh I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk about my mom. A lot of times we don't think about our own our own heritage. And I think what you're doing with the podcast, daughters and their mothers is just sensational. And that's certainly that's certainly what we need. So thank you for your gift of helping all of us remember how unique and special our moms truly are.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. I really do appreciate that. And before we go, I want to invite our listeners to join the conversation by following us on Facebook and Instagram. It's easy to find, just look for a daughter's inheritance. Because this show isn't just about you listening in on a conversation between me and our guests, it's about building a community together. Today we talked about bases and other episodes we've talked about quilts or games, and I know some of you listening have thought, oh, my mother quilted, or we played that game, or I actually knew that guest or that guest's mother. And I know that's true because I have gotten messages from some of you to that effect, and that's the kind of conversation I want to keep growing. So come follow us on Facebook and feel free to comment on the posts, and let's build a community of daughters. And as always, I hope you enjoyed this conversation. Maybe it reminded you of your own Cheerios moment or a flower show moment that seemed simple, but really did have an impact on your life. Until next time, be patient, be kind, and be fair.