Fullerton Woman’s Life Is a Long, Loving Letter Home

Lovina Elizabeth Lund recalls those days in Kirkman, Miss., on what had been a sprawling plantation.

They were making a fresh start--she and her parents, two brothers, grandma and grandpa--after selling the farm and heading down south. By then, Myrtie, her older sister, had died of a burst appendix. She was only 11 years old.

This was several years ago, mind you. . . . 1914, to be exact.

We are sitting in Lovina’s living room in Fullerton and I can see the glint in her eyes. There were the palominos, Babe and Nancy, and the Rhode Island red rooster, Wilhelm. That bird would strut around muttering what sounded like Hock der Kaiser .

The cotton, of course, grew in vibrant, blossoming rows. The wild persimmon trees. So much watermelon that you’d just eat the heart and then feed the rest to the cows.

And remember the black women powdering their faces with flour before a Saturday night in town? There was always that beautiful gospel singing coming from the Baptist church, all day Sunday morning and on through the afternoons.

Then the memories abruptly depart and others come back in snatches to take their place: Alaska, Omaha, Grand Rapids, South Dakota, Los Angeles, the desert, the children and both husbands, jobs and friends. The bumpy trajectory leaves Lovina slightly embarrassed, and she clutches at her book.

“You know, I’m not as sharp as I used to be,” she tells me, time and again. “Some days are better than the rest.”

Still, Lovina’s stories always come out, a portrait of an extraordinary life begun July 31, 1893, in Gaines, Kent County, Mich., on the Brown family farm.

That too is where Lovina begins her book, “All Things Work Together,” a self-published autobiography off the presses barely more than a month. It took her four years to write it, in longhand, on a pad resting against her knees. Arthritis ruled out typing.

This story of one woman’s life is a long, loving letter home--to Lovina’s family, her friends and to anybody else. It ropes the heart.

Fast with a smile, Lovina is dressed today in a lavender dress, jacket and pearls. Next month she’ll be 97 years old. She lives alone. She made her weekly beauty shop appointment the day before I came; this time she got a perm.

Lovina doesn’t drive anymore--she sold her ’62 Chevy at the age of 94--because she didn’t want to chance blemishing a perfect record on the road. She says she’s not sure how much longer God wants her to hang around. Already she’s outlived everybody else in her family, and she’s got a bad heart.

“You see this,” she says, pulling out a Lifeline alarm that hangs from a chain tucked under her dress. “You push this and all hell breaks loose.”

Then Lovina lets go with one of those belly laughs.

The reasons that Lovina decided to write her story down are many, of course, but mainly she says it’s so her family can figure out just who’s related to whom. These things tend to blur over the years; people move on and lose sight of their roots.

“And a lot of these people that we consider family are no relation at all,” she says, thumbing through the genealogical listings in the back of her book. “Like this Gordon. He lives in Castro Valley. He writes to me, considers me in his family. They all do.”

Which, of course, is just fine with Lovina. She loves people and these days wishes more of them would come around. She doesn’t get out as often as she’d like. Old age makes you more dependent on people, and Lord knows, everybody has got to have their own life.

“I really have no idea why I’ve lived so long,” she says. “I really have no idea. . . . It’s because I live such a clean life.”

Then comes another laugh. What else are you supposed to say with a question like that?

Lovina takes a pause, and then she goes on.

“Maybe God has let me live this long because I had things to do. . . . Now I pray, every day, that He’ll let me get everything finished.”

Because, naturally, there is so much more to get done. The book, for starters. Copies are piled up here in her small house. She’s got to get them on the move. She promised so many of them for Christmas presents, months before they were even out.

And then there’s the day next month when her eighth great-great-grandchild is due.

“Let’s see,” she says, marching across the room to retrieve a tiny scrap of paper cluttered with the names of all the rest. Then she reads the list aloud.

The total to date breaks down like this: three children, nine grandchildren, 20 great-grandchildren and the seven little ones after that.

Lovina and I keep talking, about this time and that, about who worries about whom. Life, of course, isn’t the same as it has always been. The slowness of this new pace sometimes gets Lovina down. She so enjoys having things to do.

Just last year, she painted another picture, something like No. 222, as a wedding gift for her nephew and his bride. It was a still-life, in oil, of roses in a vase.

Then Lovina asks me, again, just how it was that I had heard about her and her book. I think it was by chance.

“Funny,” she says, “but it seems like I’ve known you all my life.”

Lovina, I tell her, I could say the same about you.