"What is to be, will be" Mama Butler

Mama Butler saved everything of any use. She had balls of tin foil, string, and rubber bands in the kitchen just in case she might need them. She made quilts from parachutes brought back from WWII. She could make a woman's skirt and jacket out of a mans suit of clothes. She took the mans jacket and cut it down to fit, and took the trousers and opened them up and pieced together a straight skirt. I know because she made my mom one after my parents got married. She took plain cotton string and crocheted it into a useful doily or pot holder. I saw her take little pieces of used soap that she had saved and put it together with homemade lye soap that she made in her kitchen.

She was a Primitive Baptist and that meant that "God was all power". Everything happened just as it should and what was meant to be would happen. If you were meant to go to heaven ,you would and if not..well that was just preordained that way. No need to try and talk anyone into being saved, because their fate was sealed from the start. I never heard her argue or debate anyone about religion.. and I never knew her to worry about anything.

She was resourceful and practical, down to earth and kind. She always smiled when she saw me and said"There's my namesake" I always felt special when I was around her. One time she told me that she never had voted (I guess it was that trust that everything would turn out as it should). She said she had never had an injection from a Doctor and since I had , I was amazed by that fact. I don't know if she knew how to drive a car because when they lived in Loganville my grandparents would walk to town from their house. She told me that in school she had studied the Blue Back Speller and that she wrote on a slate with chalk instead of pencil and paper.

One time I went to church with her at Haynes Creek . The choir sang without instruments with the men on one side and the ladies on the other. Their voices sang in the Sacred Harp style. The harmony was so touching it could bring you to tears.

The day of her funeral, we all woke to a mocking bird singing outside. Daddy said ,"mama always told us, never kill a mocking bird." When we got to the church, there was another one singing its heart out right outside the church. I knew that the mocking bird's song that day at her funeral was a sign that she was in heaven and everything was as it should be.....