All five of the siblings in front our our Newark home
when Ramona was at Boyd High School

Memories of Mona

One of my earliest memories of my sister Ramona is of her being on the spirit team at Boyd High School in the early 50’s.  The girls all wore green corduroy dresses with gold trim as those were the Boyd Yellow Jacket school colors.  Mona made her own dress, as I imagine the other girls did as well.  She also made me, her little five-year-old sister, a matching dress.  I felt that I was the most precious and loved young sister in our little town.  Our family watched the football games from old wooden bleachers.  At half time, out came our beautiful elder sister with her squad who had a marching and dipping routine very dissimilar to today’s drill teams… and I dipped and marched along the sides enjoying how my green skirt floated and swayed.

Not many years later, when I was in second grade, Mona finished her first year at Texas Women’s University and came home to marry her childhood sweetheart.  By this time we lived in a big white frame house on the east side of Fort Worth.  I was to be the flower girl, and I took my responsibilities most seriously.  Mona, using her meticulous sewing skills, crafted her own wedding dress. Many years later, I made mine as well.  And she also sewed a beautiful red taffeta dress for me.

Her wedding was to be at Christmas time, so it was decided to use red and silver Christmas tinsel to cover the headband on my hair.  Ramona wrapped an old Easter basket with white satin to hold the rose petals. I wore my hair in curlers at school the day of the wedding and loved the novelty of it.  Then, as now, it was straight as a board!

The night before the wedding, our family held the rehearsal dinner in our large old home. Marquita followed Mona’s careful directions in making tuna, shrimp, and cream-filled popovers from recipes in our family cookbook, Ladies Home Companion Cook Book.  They were so good, I used to wonder they were never served anywhere else for festive occasions.  Ramona was already us younger sisters' ideal of a homemaker.

That is my Papa Stem looking on behind my left shoulder.

Then came the evening of December 20, 1957. I was so nervous about how to be a flower girl.  My family remembers that I dropped one rose petal at a time and forgot to smile walking up the chapel aisle. The picture of the event reminds me of the tinsel shining in my hair, the cordovan colored shoes we finally found for me to wear, my taffeta dress, and my serious expression.

The next Christmas in 1958, I asked Santa for a bride doll.  I always asked for a doll at Christmas: sometimes I asked for a baby doll or a young girl doll, or a bride doll.  On that morning, I found a beautiful doll in my stocking with a long white dress. I didn’t realize at first the dress was made of the fabric from which Mona had fashioned her own bride dress.

I had already been checking out my packages under the Christmas tree and realized there was a strange cylindrical package with my name on it.  When we finally started opening our gifts, it was the first one I ripped into. It was an oatmeal box!  The cavity inside was filled with a trousseau of dresses for my doll.  It was from my loving newly married sister, Mona.  She had taken the doll Mom and Dad purchased early and made all kinds of clothes for her. I don’t remember anything else I received that year.

I'm holding my new bride doll and
standing beside my baby sister, Camille.

Not long after, Ramona and Lyndel were sent overseas to Germany for Lyndel’s first deployment in the Air Force.  All of us grieved at their leaving, but I really struggled with it.  We’d studied Holland in social studies, so I begged Ramona to send me wooden shoes.  She promised she would.  I was too young and inexperienced to realize how hard it was for her to leave the familiarity and closeness of family and Texas to venture out to another land and another continent.

She told me later that her salvation from loneliness was in her letters home detailing how she fixed up her little home and including carefully drawn floor plans of the apartment.  We hung over the letters and read them over and over.  And at Christmas a package arrived in the mail with wooden shoes enclosed.  Later I received a tiny Dutch boy and girl and a Swiss doll as well.  I sent her my sixth grade class picture with an inscription on the back:

Mrs. Reynolds Sixth Grade Class at Tandy Elementary, Fort Worth, Texas.

I wrote this on the back of the photo.

She told me recently she cried and cried when she received it, because she was so very lonely at the time.  They used to say Mona was my little mama.  She was a basic part of my sense of worth and later realization of how God loves His children.

Many years have passed. I have sons and daughters.  I look up to my grandmothers and mother and sisters as I choose how to live my life.  I love to cook for my dear ones, sew for the children and grandchildren, decorate my house, search for a bargain, cherish family heirlooms, and follow in their footsteps.

In recent years I have learned to know Ramona as a friend, a fount of knowledge about our family, and my sister in Christ.  She loved my husband’s songs and guitar music.  She and my sister Marquita and I had adventures prowling through antique shops and estate sales.  Family reunions drew us all together with the common bonds of memories and faith.

Ramona has gone on to join my family’s ‘cloud of witnesses’ in heaven.  I grieve her loss as a companion and mentor.  I regret not having asked her more questions.  I am assured that she has gone to a better place at which we will join her by and by.