3722 Timberlake - Mary Witherspoon
Submitted for History Project by son, David Witherspoon September 14, 2009
My Favorite Christmas
Mary E. Witherspoon
(originally Published Dec. 25, 1983)
It was the winter of 1976. I was fifty-seven, and he was sixty. He had retired early from his engineering job, and we had moved to northern Florida, intending to stay there the rest of our lives. We'd built a dream house by a lake, bought a small boat, made new friends — but we felt superannuated, lonesome and homesick for mountains. At Christmastime our oldest son John, with his wife and child, would be visiting with his wife's mother. Our youngest son was in graduate school at UT. Our middle son, David, lived alone in "the shack" on top of Mt. LeConte, as keeper of the lodge.
"Why don't you spend Christmas with me?" asked David.
"On the mountain?"
"Why not?"
Why not was that although we had hiked LeConte before, we never had done it in winter. It might be bitter cold; there might be snow or ice, or both. I was fifty-seven; he was sixty. Still, why not? Bill, our youngest, who had also worked up there, would be hiking with us.
These two sons backpacked Christmas up the mountain for us. They scouted the trails and chose the one least likely to defeat us. On Christmas eve, in the early morning, the thermometer in Gatlinburg read 28 degrees. We loaded lunch into Bill's backpack, along with a change of clothes and a few small Christmas presents. We swaddled ourselves in fabric warmth, including longjohns, stocking caps and gloves, and we made bold faces just as though we were still young.
The snow hung heavy on the rhododendron bushes, hopping-rocks across the streams were glazed, the streams and waterfalls were thinly veiled with ice. In spots the footing was so treacherous we chose to go on hands and knees and backsides. Even so, as I remember, both of us slipped and fell at least four times. But oh, there never was a Christmas so pristine and meaningful, so real. David met us for lunch at Rocky Spur, where the sun had melted snow from massive boulders and warmed their surfaces enough for us to sit on. The snow was easier to walk on than the ice, and when we reached the top, it spread around us trackless, undisturbed except for the imprint of David's boots and close beside his tracks the delicate small prints of a mountain bobcat.
That afternoon from Clifftops we could see for miles and miles, mountains behind mountains, most of them in Tennessee, but some in Carolina, touched, this special time of year, with sunset. That night with a wood stove burning in the shack we celebrated family with wine and cheese and comedy and philosophic talk. David served us soybean stew, and when we were ready for bed, he gave us his own shelter – double-decker bunks with piles of blankets we would need when the fire burned out – he and Bill made do with much less comfort in a nearby cabin. We slept in reverent security that night and woke to subtle sounds of wildlife. Our sons came in to build a fire and serve us coffee. Then with muffled steps we walked a trail together till we saw the sunrise touching mountains range on range. Underneath a white cloud cover down below us lay the long and narrow valleys, still asleep. Christmas morning! This, I thought, is Christmas morning as it should be.
(published in the Knoxville News-Sentinel, December 25, 1983)
The following Foreward, Letter to Lalah and Herschel Macon, and Chronology of Mary Witherspoon’s life were submitted by David Witherspoon. They are from a collection of his mother’s unpublished writings called “A Bowl of Bone”
Foreword
Born on June 14, 1919 and married on July 13, 1942, a loving wife and devoted mother to three sons, Mary Elizabeth (Rhyne) Witherspoon nevertheless wrote every day, until disease and dementia debilitated her. After that she "played with her papers", as her family of caregivers lovingly joked, until she died on April 13, 2003.
Her two published novels, Somebody Speak for Katy (Doubleday, 1950) and The Morning Cool (Macmillan, 1972), are not represented here. Nor, with a few exceptions, are her published stories, articles and poems (or The Price of Intervention, her Masters thesis on United States involvement in Guatemala). This posthumous collection mostly samples unpublished work, including her unfinished Memoirs, a history called Watercolor: Florence, a novel called I Need Elizabeth, selected letters, travel journals, four short stories and a few favorite poems.
David Witherspoon
Emerts Cove
2004
. . . . . . . . .
December 15, 1985
Dear Lalah & Hershal – do you remember?
Sometime in the early 1950's, when I was seeking my personal spiritual niche, I wrote to Philadelphia and inquired about the possibility of becoming a Quaker "at large". That, I learned, wasn't possible, but it was possible to become a member of the Wider Quaker Fellowship, and I did. Soon after that, you showed up at my house. You immediately made me welcome into the esoteric world of Quakers; it was you, first of all and most of all, who gave me a sense of family in Quaker meeting, and it is that sense of family that means most to me. Together you, birthright Friends, and I, "convinced", and a handful of others of Quaker persuasion became charter members of West Knoxville Monthly Meeting of Friends. I have been bragging about it ever since.
I remember you: on the way to meeting, week after week picking up students, newcomers, anybody at all with a transportation need. I remember you in the meeting house, building fires and bringing flowers, speaking out, singing, quoting poetry in worship; Hershal adding his quiet, measured wisdom to a business meeting, Lalah winning the hearts of the children. I remember you outside the meeting house, pruning and planting and raking leaves, and in your own yard, feeding wild creatures, weeding steep banks, building a wildflower trail, chopping wood.
I remember Hershal working in kitchen, putting out the very first issue of the Southern Appalachian Friend, and both of you in my Florida driveway, building ""Macon circle". I remember especially a day when the three of us took off to a beach, leaving Jack behind; we got home late, and he was concerned, and Lalah said with a radiant face, "Jack, we have been children, all day long!"
Merry Christmas and love to you both.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Mary Witherspoon Chronology
1919 Born June 14
1933–36 Diary
1919–37 Memoirs
1936–38 Speech major at Florida State College for Women (now FSU)
1937 with brother Heif to Europe
1938–41 UNC Chapel Hill (member of Carolina Playmakers, AB in Drama)
1938 Letters 1938–39
1940 "Danger – Crossing" published in Poetry Caravan
1940 Letters 1940-41
1941 lost for 18 hours in cave with Emma Bess Watson
1941 Letters 1941-42
1942 married Jack Witherspoon July 13
1943 Nurse's Aide at Ellis Hospital in Schenectady NY
1943 Heart Lake
1946 son John Rhyne born January 18
1946 authored "Come to the Party" column for Schenectady Gazette
1948 son David Allen born November 9
1950 Somebody Speak for Katy published by Dodd, Mead
1950 fellowship to Breadloaf Writers' Conference
1950's Southern Appalachian Friend
1950's writing Peckerwood
1954 son William Dale born July 10
1957 Puerto Rico
1958 "Bonfire" published in The Christian Home
1957 Yucatan & Guatemala
1960 "The Hero" published in Upward, October 30 (transl. into Braille)
1961 "Thangs" published in The Christian Home (February)
1961 West Knoxville Friends Meeting House opened in October
1962 Western trip
1964 Second Western trip
1964–65 Florida & Jamaica
1965 History MFA from UT ("The Price of Intervention")
1965–68 History Instructor at Knoxville College
1966 Eastern U.S. & Canada
1967 London, Paris, Scotland
1968 Caribbean, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas
1968 Chicago, Canada, Oregon, Crater Lake, California
1969 Puerto Rico
1969 Wyoming
1969-70 Virginia, North Carolina, Florida and Western U.S.
1970 Nine-Twenty Point Eight submitted to Macmillan
1971 Iceland, England, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Nassau
1972 Gaspe, Canada, Maine
1972 The Morning Cool published by MacMillan
1973 Scandinavia
1974 Italy (Florence)
1975-76 Eastern U.S.
1976 writing Watercolor
1976 with Jan to Italy, Austria and England
1976 Russia, Poland & Berlin
1976 "My Favorite Christmas"
1977 Big Bend
1977 Alaska
1978 "Devil's Heritage" (article from Watercolor) in June EPA Journal
1978 consultant to Panhandle Area Educational Cooperative, March 17
1978 "The Citizens Handbook" for Bay County League of Women Voters
1978 with Taryn to Mexico
1979 Watercolor finished
1979 Death Valley
1979 Hawaii
1980 Italy, Germany, India, Thailand, China, Katmandu, Malaysia, Japan,
1981-89 Visits with Mary
1982 Carolina, Canada, Colorado, Montana, Banff
1982-83 Texas & Hawaii
1983 Spain
1983 Iberia
1984 Journal (Europe & Western U.S.)
1985 Jamaica, Nova Scotia
1986 Vancouver, Texas, Grand Canyon
1987 Ireland, England, Paris, Salzburg, Vienna, Munich
1988 Oregon Trail, England
1989 "Lerning to Reed" published in Tropic, January 8
1989 Winnipeg, Hudson Bay
1989 Italy (Fabio), Egypt, Kenya
1989 writing I Need Elizabeth
1990 California
1991 QE2 : England
1991 Newfoundland
1992 "The Exquisite Corpse"
1992 Jekyll Island
1992 Iowa
1993 "If You Can Catch Me"
1993 "On Leaping from Rock to Rock" published in Whose Woods These Are,
a History of the Breadloaf Writers' Conference
1993 Eastern U.S.
1994 Panama Canal & Costa Rica
1994 "Love Song After 52 Years"
2003 died April 13
