Lenoir June Ragland

I'm back in the US for a short visit. My grandmother died and the funeral was yesterday.


She lived a long full life. She was 95 and there were several times over the past 5 years when we thought she wasn't going to make it. I'm looking forward to the times with family over the next couple of days to remember her. She was a strong woman and it was a lot of fun to be her granddaughter.

When I was about 8 (I was the oldest grandchild), my grandparents started taking all us grandchildren to a family church camp for a week. The first year there were 5 of us: me, Amy, Ron, and my cousins Tom and Mike. A couple years later, my younger cousins Brad and Sam also came. We stayed at a lake in Missouri. The bullfrogs were voluminous! The boys did tons of fishing and frog hunting. We all got lots of chiggers, poison ivy, and mosquito bites and spent as much time as possible swimming. Every year until I was 16 or 17, my grandparents took us. Afer a couple of the first years, they built a lodge and we were able to stay in air conditioned rooms. So, it was 7 grandkids for a week at summer camp with my grandparents. These are some great memories.


My grandma was always a baker. Each holiday visit we'd arrive to find tubs and tubs of our favorite cookies filling the house. Then for the meal, there'd be at least a couple of varieties of pie. Ron's favorite was pumpkin, so there were always at least a couple pumpkin pies and then maybe a pecan pie to go with it. For a few years, she was making cinnamon rolls for everyone. Her rolls were always rolled out so that the layers of bread between gooey cinnamon sugar were nice and thin. She'd buy some special sweetened flour from the donut shop to make her bread and rolls. I don't know what was in that flour, but it made the bread extra sweet and soft.


One of my favorite memories of Lyra with my grandma was of preparing pie crusts for Christmas pies. She worked with grandma to help get the crusts into the tins and crimp the edges. For us adults, it was great to see them working together. But I asked her, and its not something she remembers. It's funny how the memories for kids and adults are significant in different ways. Grandma always had lots of patience with her and enjoyed when Lyra would climb into her lap for a ride in the wheel chair from the car into the restaurant.

Grandma loved to have the house full, there was no such thing as too many people in the house. At family gatherings you'd find people in the living room, dining room, kitchen, breezeway, basement and spilling out into the back yard where there was a trampoline to entertain us kids. She had 4 spare beds in the old house that were often full with visiting family or friends. For her, life was meant to be shared with as many people as possible.