How a grandmother’s rain lilies unite family members

My Facebook post yielded many responses, including two I could never have imagined, both of which came through tagging my treasured cousin Betty Harrington, the Derrick family historian who

had always been my living link to East Tennessee. The first was a photo of a family gathering circa 1951, in the very kitchen I had remembered. There sat my grandparents — whose faces I

recognized only from two old photographs — surrounded by various aunts, uncles and cousins, including Betty as a girl, and my mother's sister, Illa, and her daughter, Sue. My

grandmother held my cousin Bill Duncan, then a small baby, of whom I had just one brief memory before we reached our teens. The photo yanked me back in a dizzying swirl of time to when I

last stood in that kitchen, at the age of 8. I burned for the lost years and relationships and took note of the poster's name, Melanie Vaughn Duncan, Bill's wife. Soon, Melanie and

I began corresponding, and she sent me pictures of my grandfather that I had never seen. Later, in a thrilling cascade, she sent photographs of all the family, including Bill, with whom I

soon scheduled a long-overdue phone call. I asked him about our grandmother. “She was a good lady, boy, just as kind as she could be,” he said. “She'd give me a nickel every time

I'd go the creek and get a bucket of water." My Mother's Day post also brought an astonishing message from Debbie Rolen Williams, Aunt Illa's granddaughter and Sue's

daughter. “Yesterday, I saw the picture of Popaw Derrick's kitchen and it touched me deeply [and] stimulated in me an emotional and sensual memory,” my cousin wrote. “I remember the

house, the smells, the way the porch felt to stand on it and look at all the rocks in the yard.” And so began a wonderful correspondence, in which she mentioned that my grandmother had grown

little rain lilies. I had no idea. I knew that grandmother Derrick baked something sweet every day — usually, a pie or cake or cookies — but I hadn't known she'd grown flowers.

Then, Debbie said the lilies had been handed down through the generations, and promised to share them.