Addie Ledford

Ik % 1 / ? à c -s \ N The last time I saw Addie Ledford alive, she was still practicing her history, studying the facts, striving to keep the story straight in her mind. She and Burnam used to do that together , before his death in 1983 ended their marriage in its 80th year. Addie had always liked school-first as a student and then as a teacher-and from the day she started first grade at Harlan in 1891, she took delight in learning and remembering. Most people seemed to think that when Burnam died at the age of 106, his constant companion through eight decades of Kentucky life would soon lay down her burden and follow him. Addie Ledford by John Egerton Burnam himself hoped as much. In the last week of his life, he said to her, "Addie, I'm ready to go home, ready to die. Are you ready to go with me? ' But Addie said no. She was only 98; she might live to be as old as her husband , or at least pass the century mark. Her health and other circumstances soon compelled her to move from the family home in Lancaster to a nursing home in nearby Stanford. It was there that I saw her last on a July morning in 1987. She still wore her silver hair piled and pinned atop her head. Physically, she was weaker, unable to move about or to care for herself, but her voice was 63 strong, and her mind floated from vivid dreams through blank spaces to the solid ground of remembrance and reality. "Who'd you say you were?" she asked, holding her fingers to her lips in a familiar pose of thoughtful pondering. "Where did I know you? Your name sounds familiar. I remember somebody named John, but now I don't know who it was. Old John Skidmore was my great-grandfather. Listen! Everything I've told you is the truth-at least I'm trying to tell you the truth, the best I can, but sometimes I forget." "Are you hurting, Addie?" "No, I'm not in misery. I've got some kind of disease, but the doctor hasn't told me what it is. My father died of tuberculosis when I was ten. That was in 1903, 1 believe-no, 1903 was the year I married Burnam. I was almost 19 years old, and he was 27. He was a self-made boy, a schoolteacher. He was born and raised in Harlan County, and moved away, and then came back to teach, and I was a teacher too. I went to school at Harlan Town and Evarts, and then at Williamsburg and at Cumberland Gap, and then at Berea, and I started teaching when I was 16." "Tell me about the day you got married ." I wanted to hear the story one more time. "It was a pretty day, and cold, the 18th of December. We were at my Uncle Curl Pope's house at Cawood. They called him Curl because he had curly hair. We borrowed horses from Uncle Curl and rode the seven miles into Harlan town to get married. George Pope, Curl's son, my first cousin, went with us. Randall Browning, a Baptist preacher, married us at his house. Then we moved to Garrard County, and Burnam was a storekeeper. I had 13 children: Ewell, Eloise-sne's still teaching out in CoIorado -and let's see, Bill, Carl ... I know all of them, if I could just think. You see, I'm getting old. I figured out last year I was 102 years old. Somebody tried to argue with me that I was just 101, but I knew better." "You were right," I said. "I was? You know, Burnam lived to be 106. I might live that long myself. Did you say your name was John? Are you still writing books? Do you have good luck with them? I'd be glad to help you any way I can. I bet if you'd leave some of them with me I could sell them to these old people around here. You could keep all the money." We were friends...