Teaching is in our blood

     Mary Magdalene Carson was born in 1899 in Ripley, Tennessee.  Mary disliked her name and instead changed it first to Magalene then to Maggie L.  Friends and neighbors called her Miss Maggie.  We visited Grandma Nelson (what my siblings called her)  in the summers down in Memphis, Tennessee.  She would proudly take us around and introduce us to her friends. Grandma sent us to church on Sundays and tied  money for church in the end of our handkerchiefs. Miss Maggie had a beautiful garden and a big front porch where the grown ups sat in the evening on her rocking chairs and my personal favorite, a glider.  Inside her home I remember  a grandfather clock, a piano, a fancy telephone chair,  and a beautiful vanity in her bedroom and a dining room table with clawed feet.  Her closet was filled with old Jet magazines we'd spend hours looking through.  In the morning the house smelled like bacon and coffee, Grandma even let us have coffee with our breakfast.  (A lot of milk and sugar with a splash of coffee).  There are fond memories of many summer trips.  After she died   I found out more about my grandmother that I failed to ask when we visited.  I had known from an early age that I wanted to teach and my Mother was an educator.  To my surprise and delight I found that Grandma Nelson had been a teacher.  She taught in a one room school house with a mixed age group of students.  Grandma received her teaching license in July of 1918.  Who knew?  Teaching is in our blood. 

                                A framed  Mother of pearl vanity set given to my Grandmother
                                        as an Anniversary gift.