FREE Mother's Day Gift - The Child (Alien in the Delta Series)

excerpt from The Child

Martilla Barnett Strother, my mother was born in 1903. Her mother died when she was fourteen, so she helped to raise her younger brother and sister. She completed just three years of school, and the rest of her education was obtained through experience and hard work. She was a seamstress who took in sewing for people in our community to make a little extra money. Some of her customers would ask to pay her on an installment plan, and she would tell them to pay when they could. While working in the cotton fields of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, she raised six children. When I was six years old, she was still working as a housekeeper and babysitter.

After my father died in 1972, my mother lived alone, but she was never really alone. Whenever I went home to Arkansas, she always had people of all ages coming to visit her. She became a substitute parent for many young people who lived nearby. Her favorite topic was God, and her favorite activity was raising and feeding her chickens. Whenever we talked on the phone, as long as she discussed those chickens, I knew everything was going well.

One day we were talking on the phone, and she told me that she had sold her chickens. I knew immediately that something was wrong. I called my brothers and sisters and told them what has happen. This was not good news. Those chickens were like her children. She died six months later in February 1990, at the age of eighty-seven.