Sadie

These days I am usually the first one awake in the morning. I wake up at six-thirty. And the first thing I do when I open my eyes is smile, and then I say, “Thank you, Lord, for another day!” If I don’t hear Bessie get up, I’ll go into her room and wake her. Sometimes I have to knock on her headboard. And she opens her eyes and says, “Oh, Lord, another day?” I don’t think Bessie would get up at all sometimes if it weren’t for me.

In the mornings, Monday through Friday, we do our yoga exercises. I started doing yoga exercises with Mama about forty years ago. Mama was starting to shrink up and get bent down, and I started exercising with her to straighten her up again. Only I didn’t know at the time that what we were actually doing was yoga. We just thought we were exercising. I kept doing my yoga exercises even after Mama died. Well, when Bessie turned eighty, she decided that I looked better than her. So she decided she would start doing yoga too.

These days I do most of the cooking, and Bessie does the serving. We eat our big meal of the day at noon. In the evening we usually have a milk shake for dinner, and then we go upstairs and watch “MacNeil/Lehrer” on the television.

After that we say our prayers. It takes a long time to pray for everyone, because it’s a very big family: We have fifteen nieces and nephews still living, plus all their children and grandchildren. We pray for each one, living and dead. The ones that Bessie doesn’t approve of get extra prayers.