Edna T Pays Tribute to Her mother Virginia Shulz Deaton

Today's story of a strong woman is by Edna Deaton Tollison, a faithful follower of this blog and supporter of Christian writers. When she won a giveaway on this blog, she sent me a lovely butterfly she'd crocheted. That butterfly lives on my refrigerator now. Here's Edna and the story of her mother in her own words:

"My mother was born in 1898 and died 1980. She was forty five when I came along and she already had nine other children.
She was born to Johan and Elizabeth Schultz and her Mother died in childbirth when she was four. The baby was passed on to an aunt to raise, but Mama had to stay with my grandfather. He was a full German. He later remarried and the step-mom was not that great to my Mom. She went to school only to the forth grade, but she could read and write.

She married my dad when she was twenty years old and had the ten children. She never worked outside the home and they farmed and always had a garden. My dad passed away with cancer in nineteen fifty-one when I was eight years old and left my Mother with four children still at home. she received social security off my Dad until we reached eighteen. But that is what I was raised on, and she did sewing, washing and ironing, and she always backed cakes for anyone that wanted to pay a little for them. We lived in an old house that my Dad had built when they first married. But thank God I loved school so well that I was the only one of the ten children that finished high school. All of my siblings are gone down except the brother just above me that is seven years older. I am so glad that my Mother lived long enough that she didn't lose any of her children while she was here on this old earth.

She was very Religious but didn't accept Christ as her Savior until nineteen sixty-eight, but once she did she was a very good Christian.

She fell in nineteen eighty on her door steps as she came home from a Wednesday night service. She lay there for a good while before my brother heard her, he lived next door, and came and got her up. Then she could no longer stay at home by herself. We took her from house to house as she stayed with different children until on the night of my oldest son's graduation and she fell at my sister's house and we had to take her to the hospital. She seem to be doing well but on a Friday in June I was called as I live two hours away from all the rest, and I made it up there but she had tubes coming out of her and was bleeding inside. No one know why, but she left us that night and went to be with the Lord.

I have her picture in my family room and I look at her and still talk to her, she was the best Mother there ever was and I still miss her today after thirty years. I raised four children of my own and wish she could have known my grandchildren.

Edna Tollison
Laurens, SC

My blog is http://edna-myfavoritethings.blogspot.com

Thank you so much, Edna, for sharing such a wonderful life with us. --Lyn