Maudie McKay, born at home 10 March 1916 at a rural address in Rotan, Fisher, Texas, was the tenth of John William McKay and Frances La Rhetta 'Rhetta' Thompson's fourteen children. She was seventh born of the eleven McKay girls, who were known for their beauty. At the time of the 1920 Census the family lived on a farm in Hamilton County, Texas and at the time of the 1930 Census they lived on a farm in Fisher County, Texas. Maudie hoed cotton and when necessary could kill a rattler. The farm provided food but times were hard during the Depression, the girls rolling their hair on nails. I once asked Grandmother if they were allowed to dance. 'We weren't supposed to but we had what we called games and it was dancing.'
She married William 'Bill' Wilkins 1 November 1933 in Roby, Fisher, Texas. He was 32, Maudie just 17. My mother, Billie Joyce, was born the following year on 6 September 1934 in Rotan. Grandmother told me that when my mother nursed she played with her hair, a memory I often recall when I find myself idly playing with my hair as I water the garden.
Billie and her half sister Betty Jo joked 'Couldn't she have given us girls' names?' Maudie was faithful to family and you couldn't say a word to her about her daughters—even if you were her daughter. Mother once remarked that she was the 'bad daughter.' (Betty stayed married and was a regular churchgoer in Abilene, a big Church of Christ town.) Grandmother was quick to jump in and exclaim 'Both of my girls are good girls!'
Maudie got a divorce and was judged for that but she found love with her gentle second husband Emmitt Dobbs. She lost him too soon, of a heart attack in 1965, when she was 49 and Emmitt 60. I remember sitting with her in her tiny living room in Post, Texas while she read poems that he had written for her. I could tell how much they meant to her by the quiet careful way she handled the paper. Grandmother loved and respected the written word. She and I always had a letter in the mail one to another and she requested that a poem about a ship and the sea be read at her funeral.
One of my early memories is of being put on a Greyhound with my brother Danny to go to Lubbock to visit Maudie and Emmitt. I was perhaps four and Danny is exactly one year younger so he would have been three. This must have been about the time our baby brother was born. We were bought toy Greyhound buses at the station, made of tin I suppose, and Mother asked a matronly looking lady on the bus to watch over us.
I was impressed that my grandmother spread the butter all the way to the edges of our toast while Emmitt, wearing a khaki work uniform I think, drank his coffee before he went to work. Candied orange slices sat in a glass candy dish on the coffee table and we could eat as many as we wanted whenever we liked. Maudie's coconut cake was a favorite at McKay family reunions, one of which I would attend with John in my arms and Mark in my womb.
Danny and I were sent to Vacation Bible School on this or another visit to Grandmother and I have a picture of us standing on either side of an easel painting, I in flip-flops and Danny in red sneakers. I have the intent, considering look on my face that Mother always wore when she was in the throes of creation. Ever a God seeker, this session of VBS would have been a formative experience, especially as my parents had left off attending the Church of Christ.
Grandmother was an excellent seamstress with a great sense of style and she was at her most elegant when she was married to Emmitt, wearing tailored dresses with cluster costume earrings. I have a memory of a beautiful dress in a swirly blue and purple print that Grandmother made for me when I was in perhaps second grade. To think of it still gives me pleasure.
She later worked at a dress shop in Post, where she and a couple of her widowed sisters lived in little houses at the 'lake' and wore filmy peignoirs with matching robes all the day long. Mother and I continued this tradition but with a significant downmarket twist, wearing cotton pajamas all the time, even to garden. One of my great aunts had a jar of something she had canned in the first year of her marriage some fifty years before. Grandmother's grief was considered to be lesser because she had not been married to Emmitt as long as her sisters had been married to their husbands.
Maudie was buried at Roby Cemetery not far (in terms of the vast Rolling Plains of Central West Texas) from her birthplace. At Grandmother's homegoing there was a wagon wheel with some spokes missing. The wheel began with 14 spokes, one for each of the McKay siblings, and a spoke was removed each time one of them died. My mother said she wished they'd never started it but I think it's beautiful—in the end you are left with only a circle, that symbol of eternal life. (I cried at the funeral which was frowned upon.)

lili li née Loretta McKay Masters
Austin
April, 2020