Flora Adda (Bushong) Lane (1888 - 1967)

Donna Leah Alvis

Flora (Addie) Bushong Lane  (March 2, 1888-April 29, 1967)

I don't have a first memory of my grandmother, but we formed a powerful bond from the day I arrived home from the hospital a week after my birth. My grandmother lived three doors down from my parents, and she rushed to scoop me from the crib before my dad could get acquainted with me.​ I was her first grandchild.

At my uncle’s prompting I called her Mamaw.​ She would have chosen Grandma instead, but I didn’t know that till much too late.

I remember the stories she told me about growing up in the Indian Springs area of Sullivan County, Tennessee during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.​ I should remember; I had her repeat those stories often enough.​ Years later, I realize that there wasn’t a lot to the stories but Mamaw somehow stretched them out and made the people she knew more than fifty years earlier come alive to a small child.​

I would sit on her lap as she read to me from Aunt Charlotte’s Bedtime Bible Stories, a book I’ve kept all these years.​ When I was hardly more than a baby my mother came to Mamaw’s house to take me home.​ I greeted Mom by pointing to a picture on the wall and excitedly telling her that was Jesus.​

My Uncle Squirt, as I called him, worked in a neighborhood market and would send Mamaw her groceries.​ She loved her Brown Mules (chocolate covered ice cream on a stick).​ Peppermint patties and peppermint sticks were favorites.​ Softboiled eggs on toast was her usual breakfast.

The years moved along and my grandmother’s mind became clouded with confusion.​ Hardening of the arteries they called it then.​ My younger sisters came too late to make the connection that I did with our grandmorher.​ It’s been fifty years since she moved to her heavenly home.​ It doesn’t seem that long ago…and yet it does.