Mary Rudd

 Mary Robinson Davis Rudd  1885-1960. My fathers first appointment to the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church was the tiny Mayberry-like town of Sopchoppy in Wakulla County in 1955. The panhandle town of under 600 was located on the banks of the crooked dark waters of the Sopchoppy River, which ran into the Oclockonee River, which ran into the Gulf at Panacea. My father preached one sunday at Sopchoppy, then the next at the county seat of Wakulla in Crawfordville.  My mother taught fourth grade at the nearby native stone school and during the day Mrs Mary kept me. Mrs Mary and Mr Emory Rudd lived next door to the church and parsonage on Rose Street in a wooden one story white cracker style house with the two front rooms and the rear kitchen. I loved the time with the Rudd's, looking forward to Mr Emory showing me the rats he had trapped in the barn the evening before, saving me his match boxes and Prince Albert tobacco tins to play with.  A good carpenter, Mr Emory made me a nice wooden high chair I could use to sit at the kitchen table with.  Mrs Mary and I would walk about the yard and collect the eggs the chickens had laid in the barn and under the bushes in the yard. She would then make me my favorite food of all time, her special bread pudding.  It had to be the eggs I assumed, for even to this day, the consistency has never been matched. Mr Emory was a fiddle player in a band that played down at the skating rink across the street on the river and he liked to rock a horse me on his foot and sing to me.  They had a nice front porch swing under the shady magnolia I would lay upon and watch as the occasional car would pass. One morning in 1960, mamma told me I would not be going to Mrs Mary's today. I remember looking out the window in our living room to their house and seeing a hearse. That evening mamma took me over to the house and there Mrs Mary was, lying in wake in the front bedroom.  It was one of the first death's I had seen, yet somehow I understood at the age of five. Soon after I went to stay with Mrs Porter, then the beloved Angeline Donaldson, who kept me in our home. But of all the dear ladies who kept me, none were loved more than Mrs Mary.

Where the Methodist church now is on the left was once Mr Emory and Mrs Mary’s home. The magnolia tree over hanged the front porch. Across the street was the Sopchoppy River.