“You know, I really do not have any clue how we’ll do it, but I am sure we’ll figure it out,” she said at last. “This isn’t the only crisis your dad and I have navigated together, honey. When we got married, Dad wanted to expand the farm to a thousand acres and he used to say we’d need a whole lot of children to help us run it. But that first year…” She sighed and turned back to the stove, where the peas were now over heat, bubbling away beside a pan of potatoes, sizzling in bacon fat. “You know it took us a few years to get pregnant after we were married. Then we had that tiny baby girl who was born way too early, and I got so sick after she was born.”

Mother never spoke her name aloud, but I knew about Elsie, the baby who didn’t ever get the chance to breathe. On Sundays, Mother always dressed for church early. An hour or even more before we had to leave for service, she’d walk a hundred feet or so to the lonely tree on our property. In the summer of 1909, when Mother and Dad took possession of the first two hundred acres of land around that spot, she had shipped in five little Texas live oak saplings—intending to grow them all together in a row to create a shady spot for future children to play in. One by one and despite her best efforts, the first four trees died. Mother had been a typist in Chicago before she married Dad. She didn’t know a thing about growing plants until she learned the hard way on the land.

After the baby died, Dad built a little bench seat beside that last surviving tree, and he inscribed the name Elsie on the back of it. That was Mother’s remembering place. When I learned to read, I asked about that scripted lettering etched into the back of that chair. In haunting, uneven tones, Mother told me about the tiny baby girl who didn’t survive.

“The doctor came to check on me a few months after she was born. I asked him about having another baby and he looked down his nose at me and he said, ‘Mrs. Davis, some people just are not meant to be parents,’” Mother said softly. “But I knew in my heart I was meant to be a mother.”