ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, March 14, 1996 TAG: 9603140016
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Beth Macy
DATELINE: SHAWSVILLE
SOURCE: BETH MACY
Rebecca Sears, the fourth of five children, began her mother's Feb. 22 obituary in The Roanoke Times with these words: ``Ms. Lula E. Conner Anderson, of Shawsville, has planted her last garden in this earth.''
Sears and her oldest sister, Nancy Victoria Dillon, talked recently about their mother's belief in nature, God and her own strong will. It was a blustery Sunday. A wicked wind snapped at the withering cornstalks next door in their mother's final garden - the only one she never finished digging up.
Barely budded forsythia branches swayed along the winding gravel lane. Her mother's unopened seed packets lay strewn across Rebecca's dining-room table.
``All her life, she would plant, can and freeze,'' Rebecca said. ``I'd say `Why?' And she'd say, `I have five children. They might all lose their jobs and come home, and I'll need to feed them.'''
A third-grade teacher at Herman L. Horn Elementary, Dillon recalled her mother's advice to ``bury your trouble in the dirt.''
``Sometimes I'll think of her at the end of a day if I've had trouble with the children,'' she said. ``And I'll think, I wouldn't mind having a long row of corn to hoe.''
Lula Anderson was a 4-foot-10 Primitive Baptist with a heart of gold and hands of steel. She loved quilting and going to church and singing old hymns, especially ``Amazing Grace.''
In her early 30s, when her husband's disability made her the family's sole provider, she sold vegetables on the Roanoke City Market and milk to Clover Creamery. She raised chickens and pigs.
In her 50s, she planted 67,000 pines on her 69-acre farm. In her 60s, she went to work as a truck-stop cook. In her 70s, she took care of sick elderly people.
The two sisters recalled last year when, at age 87, she was admitted to the hospital for the first time in her life. The diagnosis was congestive heart failure. The treatment, according to two insistent nurses, required an IV and a catheter.
Mother said no. The nurses said yes.
Rebecca walked out mid-argument, telling the nurses, ``You're on your own.''
Three minutes later, they walked out too: No IV, no catheter and no way were they going to tell Lula Anderson what to do.
``She stayed there one night and never went back,'' Rebecca said. ``I don't know who was happiest - her to leave, or them to get rid of her.''
The two sisters recalled their mother's story about accompanying her own mother to the voting polls in 1920, the first year women were allowed to vote. It made a lasting impression on the 12-year-old. Religiously, Lula made her own daughter drive her to the polls every Election Day morning.
``I'd coach her on the way down there; I'd try to sway her to vote for people committed to education,'' recalled Sears, who is curriculum specialist at the Noel C. Taylor Learning Academy.
``When we'd get there, she'd square her shoulders up in the booth and say to me, `I always vote straight Republican' - click, click, click, click, click.
``She listened to everybody else, but she had a mind of her own.''
When Rebecca was a little girl, she rode the milk truck with her mother from their Montgomery County farm to the Roanoke City Market, where her mother regularly sold vegetables.
Rebecca recalled catching a Roanoke city bus one day to her uncle's house and seeing the sign that directed ``COLORED TO THE REAR.''
``Mother dragged me to the back of the bus, and she rooted her behind in there between all the other ladies while the bus driver just glared at her. She told me, `We paid our fare, and nobody will tell me where I can sit on this bus.'
``So I always knew that it was wrong - if you can take away one person's rights, you can take away others' rights, too.''
Her mother remained feisty till the end, shopping the 1996 seed catalogs, insisting she would make it to spring. She paid her newspaper subscription one year at a time - to prove she'd still be around. When Rebecca tried to force her to take the nerve pills her doctor prescribed, she spat them across the room.
Through it all, she told her children and grandchildren: ``An education is the best thing you can get for yourself.'' She was proudest of the fact that her three daughters were all college-educated, though she had only a seventh-grade education herself.
At the funerals of her contemporaries, Lula scoffed at flowers, calling them a waste. Accordingly, in lieu of funeral flowers, her daughters created the Lula Conner Anderson Scholarship to help a deserving Shawsville High School student go to college.
``She thought that women shouldn't have to depend on men,'' Vicky Dillon said. ``She was very independent. She liked the idea of helping someone else become independent, too.''
Outside her sister's house, Vicky stood in the driveway with the wind cutting into her face. She gestured past the hill toward the garden where her mother toiled every spring until this one.
``When I think of mother,'' she offered, ``I think of the only person in the world who never let me down.''
Contributions to the Lula Conner Anderson Scholarship can be mailed to Premier Bank, Shawsville, Va. 24162.
LENGTH: Long : 101 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: NANCY VICTORIA DILLON. "You bury your trouble in theby CNBdirt": Lula Anderson was planting onion sets in her garden at her
Montgomery County home when this photograph was taken a decade ago.
color.