Browns

 Farewell Henry Brown

Intaglio etching 

Farewell, old Coila’s hills and dales

Her healthy moors and winding vale’s:

The scenes where wretched Fancy roves,

Pursuing past, unhappy loves!

Farewell, my friends! farewell, my foes!

My peace with these, my love with those

The bursting tears my heart declare,

Farewell, the Bonnie banks of Ayr!

Robert Burns

It was this week in 1976 we were in Homewood, Mississippi for one of our too few family reunions. It was the last time we would ever see

many, it would be years before we saw many again. 

My cousin Jeanne Bradford Rowland would know the relation, but before we left to return to Williston with mamma, Lewis and Goliath in the Dodge van, we stopped at William Henry and Juliah Hettie Browns farm. I gathered they were

a huge influence in my fathers growing up in Homewood. Henry at the time was 81. He would pass on ten years later. Hettie was 79 and would live until 1992. Daddy would live until 2011, mamma 2017.

These are the lost stories of a past I wish I had somehow recorded, heard and known. 

All that’s left is a love etched in a zinc plate.