This story will not be complete until I tell you the beginning, who my mother was and still is, somewhere in the deep places of her soul.

Virginia Wilson was born in Amarillo, Texas, on May 17, 1929 to Ralph and Alma Wilson, and spent the better part of her childhood in South Plains, Texas, a “wide spot” in the road, where I accompanied her in 2005, so she and I could revisit our Texas roots.  

Born the year the Great Depression began, “Gin,” as her family called her, was reared by hardworking parents, but like everyone else of that era, grew up poor. Photos from her childhood confirm this. Clean but well-worn clothes, no shoes, or near worn out shoes, and a host of similarly clad playmates, carbon copies of the Wilson children.

The story I was told was that my grandmother Alma “worked for the public,” which I interpreted as cleaning of some sort, perhaps laundry. For as long as I knew her, my grandmother worked in a dry cleaners. Long after she had been diagnosed with cancer, she kept working “a press,” and when her lungs would fill with fluid, she would drive herself on the Los Angeles freeways to the hospital, have her lung drained, and be back at work the next day.

My grandfather—again, this is from scant information I have, not the whole story—was a dreamer, and “anytime he had two nickels to run together,” would move the family somewhere else, always hoping for better days and greener pastures. I assume that is true. The general consensus on getting through the Depression was to be on the move.  

Perhaps it was these early “hard scrabble” days, as they were described, which caused my grandmother to instill in my mother the need to be “independent.”

And that is precisely what Virginia Wilson did. She graduated from high school early, went to West Texas State College, again graduating early, and got a job at the Air Force base in Amarillo. That’s where she met Carl Arends, who had joined the Air Force and left his home in Jacksonville, Florida.

They met and six weeks…yes, weeks… later they got married. Their only daughter—by which I mean me—was born the following year.

Virginia Arends became a high school teacher. I remember her teaching at Seminole High School, Denver City High School and then, when we moved to Florida in 1967, teaching at Terry Parker High School.  

She worked till retirement age, retired, and then came back to Terry Parker as a substitute.

She taught both English and business subjects, particularly typing and shorthand.

More times than I can count, when we would be shopping or eating out, someone would approach my mother, call out “Mrs. Arends,” and then thank her for “teaching me to type,” and list the multiple opportunities and benefits they had received from her insistence they learn the keyboard.

If she caught them looking at their keys, while doing an exercise—she bragged to me many times—she would march straight to the student, yank the paper from the carriage, tear it up, and then tape a file folder to the front of the typewriter, to make a roof over their hands, so they could not look at the letters.

And yes, my mother could type faster than a speeding bullet.

As devoted a business and English teacher as she was, she was even more devoted to being a Sunday School teacher.

She always…and I do not use that word lightly…always had the Bible open somewhere—on the kitchen table or a desk. She had an extensive library of devotional books, concordances, study Bibles, maps, handbooks, and commentaries.

When we lived in Denver City (1960-67), her mentor was Sweetie Belle Toler, a lovely, soft, fluffy, gray-haired saint, who had arthritis so afflicting, she had to sit in a rocking chair on the last row of First Baptist Church of Denver City. Every Saturday without fail, my mother would put me in the backseat of our 1956 White Ford and we would drive to “Toler’s” house and pick her up.

Then we would drive to Dairy Mart No. 1 where I would get a Broil-a-Burger No. 2 with smoke sauce (I can taste it even now) and a vanilla creme Dr. Pepper. I would eat in the back seat while my mother and Toler talked about the Sunday School lesson for the next Sunday, going over verse after verse, verse by verse, “line upon line, precept upon precept.”

That instilled in me at a very young age how important the Bible was—that it was not just any book—it was not to be handled lightly—it had life-changing significance—it was quite simply the most important thing in the world to know God and present His truth accurately. None of this they “said,” but I knew by the tone of their voices and the length of time they spent studying and “convening,” that this was serious business. That conviction has never left me.

This is my principal memory of my childhood with my mother.

Even now, with the scantest memory left, she can quote Bible verses she has long loved and lived.