When the initial shock of our arrival had passed, Dorothy Lee showed us around her home.  The front door opened into the living room, bedroom to the left, dining room and kitchen straight shot from the front room.  Pictures of Vince were everywhere—a magnet on the refrigerator, a cardboard stand-up Vince in the front room, framed clippings on a wall.  Dorothy didn’t act gooey or silly toward Vince, but one look at her house and you could tell that she was a true fan.

Everybody’s got a story, and Dorothy Lee had a wealth of them:  Stories about her early childhood lived on a farm in Kentucky, too rural to have a “proper” address.  Stories about the children she had raised—hers, her grandchildren, even some great-grandchildren.  Stories about the husband she had buried thirty years ago.

Dorothy was born in 1911 and had lived in this house most of her adult life.  The neighborhood had seen a lot of change.  She grew up in a world that was completely segregated, and she would have been in her mid-fifties during the legendary civil-rights sit-ins in Nashville.

“I’m the oldest person in this neighborhood,” she said.  “When I moved here, it was all white.  Now I’m the last one on the block.”

She told us that people had asked her if she wanted to move.  Seeming tickled to talk about it, she said, “You know, I’m just an old woman.  I don’t care what color a person’s skin is.”  We asked her if she was afraid to live alone. 

“What would I be afraid of?” she replied.

Dorothy had a sharp mind and a quick wit.  The time flew by. 

The conversation turned, and she began to talk about her mother.  Her love was still immediate and powerful, even though death had separated them decades before.  As Dorothy spoke, I thought about her daughter, the one who had written the letter to Vince.  I though about the children that I had birthed.  I thought about the threads of need and love and care that tie us to our mothers, and then I listened.

Dorothy had been closer to her mother than her other siblings had been, not because she was the favorite, but because of unfortunate events that happened in her childhood.  For instance, one winter day while she was playing near the hearth, she rolled too close to the coals, and her clothes caught on fire.  She was in bed for months, her mother by her side.

A few years later, Dorothy Lee was playing with some children in the loft of their barn, when she lost her footing, fell to the ground, and broke her back.  The long road to recovery strengthened the special closeness they shared, and as the years rolled by, the bond between them held steady.

On the day her mother died, Dorothy recalled, her world ground to a halt.  She couldn’t find the energy to do much of anything.  Some days she could hardly eat.  Most days she never got out of her nightclothes.  She remembered hearing bits and pieces of one-sided conversations as her husband spoke to concerned callers from the phone in the hall:  “No, this isn’t a good day,” he would say, or “She seems to be feeling a little better today.”