Most of the teachers in my life have stood at lecterns or pulpits or wrapped their arms of love around me as they raised me; but, Grandma Mavis taught me most from a seated position with her house-slippered feet propped up on an orange leather ottoman while she sat in an autumnal colored velour side chair splotched with rust and yellow bouquets.
This woman impacted me in my young years and then taught me more in my adult years by conversations held in the informal classroom I knew as her *formal* living room. You know, it’s the one I’ve shared about before where the lamp shades still had the plastic on them and the pressed glass candy dishes with heavy lids that clanked loudly when you tried to quietly remove an orange slice or chocolate.
I’ve been missing her. 
She would’ve been 97 on September 1st.
She would’ve been 97 on September 1st.In my middle years when we moved back to the area my parents grew up in, this woman became one of my best friends.
Oh the love she shared with me when I was in transition from a home and area and people that I loved to a home and area and people that I came to love.
I keep a picture on my office desk of grandma and our girls when they were young and I always dressed them in matching outfits complete with hair bows as big as their darlin’ young heads; but, I’ve been going through old photos, and I loved this picture of grandma smiling from her perch.
It has me thinking how power and position sometimes place people in high places. Her health in her later years kept her housecoat clad body in this low position.
But oh, she loved so well, and I learned many life lessons from our time spent together before she graduated to eternity.
For a season of my life long past my school years, Lola Mavis Carroll schooled me and though she never administered a test, when the tests of life come, I think of this woman and her words and ways and wisdom shared in a living-room-turned-school-room and the hours I applied to a degree of life and love that is so very dear to me.
I am so thankful to the Good Lord for the life, and love, and lessons learned from my grandma Mavis.
My humble teacher lives forever with The Teacher.
September 1, 1925 – May 8, 2019
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