Tom and I met our very first day at Emory & Henry College where we were assigned to the same orientation group. Over the next four years, we had several mutual friends, and we occasionally ended up in the same class or at the same table for lunch. I would listen to his pure and powerful tenor voice in a musical or in the church choir on campus. I am sure he didn’t know I was alive. In all honesty, we pretty much lived in separate worlds, and neither of us really thought about the other. That would change the spring before graduation four years later. I would like to tell you that story…
Coming straight out of a sheltered childhood, I don’t think anyone more naive than I had ever stepped on E&H’s campus. I was used to going to bed by 9:00 and getting up by 5:00, and here I was in the middle of a bunch of people who never quieted down before midnight and who wanted to sleep half the day away. I was used to living where I couldn’t even see the nearest neighbor’s house, and here I was living with people beside, above, and below me; the endless noise level drove me crazy. Young women arranged their schedules around the soap operas, and young men stopped in front of the women’s freshmen dorm to drop their pants to show so everyone there would know that the moon was indeed full. I was completely out of my element and experienced a homesickness and sadness that I kept hidden from everyone.
On that very first day, though, a young man named Tom Sizemore would make quite the impression on me. I was part of a group that included several freshmen from “up north”; this in and of itself made me more than uncomfortable. About all I knew of the north came from cousins who lived there and sometimes visited in the summer. They made a consistent practice of making fun of Libby and me, calling us names and taunting us with little rhymes that were just plain mean. So, I was skeptical of these new northerners to say the least.
Tom Sizemore, as it turned out, was one of those northerners. I don’t remember any of the words he said, but I do remember that every single one of them was spoken in an English accent as he boldly flirted with another not so shy young lady in the group. You have to know what I was thinking–yes, I thought I was in the presence of a true Brit! I was scared to death and in awe all at the same time! And you can imagine how I felt when Tom Sizemore, who turned out to be little more that day than a big blowhard who loved attention, announced that he was from Arlington, Virginia. Little did I know that the time would come that I would no longer be quite the naive child I was on that first day and that I would fall in love with this big blowhard named Tom Sizemore.
Because we started dating just before graduation, most of our 18 months courtship was long distance. From graduation onward, we did not live in the same place until the day we married. During that 18 months, though, we were together as much as we could manage, and sometimes that included Tom coming to visit me at home. He was in Marion, Virginia at that time, and I was in Greeneville, Tennessee. Always homesick, I would go home on the weekends as often as I could. And as it was, I wanted to see both my family and Tom, so he would come to the house on Saturdays to spend the day. Being home for such a short time meant a lot of visiting in a short amount of time for me, so I dragged Tom along with me when I went to see both sets of grandparents and visit with them as they went about their daily chores.
When Tom first started visiting, he was even more a fish out of water than I was when I first arrived at E&H. He truly didn’t know what to make of just about anything or anyone there. I will never ever forget the expression on his face when we were up at the farm on Spencer Branch one Saturday, and Maybelle Green, who lived with her mother, brother, and sister in the old home place, slung her arm around his shoulder after some sort of short conversation, grinned real big, and said right in his face, “Ain’t tat right, Tom? Ain’t tat right?”.
Tom had grown up in the metropolitan Washington, DC area, so he came to our house on Helton still believing that milk and eggs came in cartons from the grocery store and that fresh produce was all neatly lined up in one section of the same store. His nights were lighted by street lamps; mine were lighted by stars. If he had an earache, his mother took him to the doctor; Paw blew smoke from his cigarette in my ear. If one of his baby teeth didn’t fall out when it should, he went to the dentist; Daddy tied a piece of fishing line around mine and gave it a jerk. He got a cortisone shot for poison ivy; MommyBlanche poured salt on a clean rag that had been dipped in boiling water and laid it over my rash to kill the poison and to dry up the blisters.
So it wasn’t just the Greens that took Tom by surprise. Mine was a whole different world for him. It was looking at me in desperation because he just couldn’t understand my grandparents’ dialect. It was the dirt roads with grass growing up in the middle and no shoulder and the carsickness that went with them. It was Daddy’s hunting and fishing and skinning and gutting. It was Mom laughing at him when he got poison ivy through the seat of his pants because he thought it was easier to sit while picking wild strawberries. It was washing the mud off a cow’s bag and then seeing the milk squeezed out the newly clean teats. (That’s not really how we pronounced that last word, by the way!) And it was so many other things, but Tom proved to be a trooper through them all.
On the flip side of the coin, I don’t think I ever gave my family the credit they deserved for taking in this city boy and making him one of their own when a farm boy would have been a much easier pill to swallow. He was as green as they come, and they loved him anyway. If they were still around, they would still love him. It’s hard not to…
Tom persevered for the love of this young woman who grew up in a place he could never have imagined, and all these years later, he’s still here loving me. He has grown to love my country ways and the mountains that are part of my soul. And after all these years, I still love him, too. He will never be a country boy, but that’s okay; I love him for all that he is. He’s gentle and funny. He’s honorable and soft-hearted. He works hard and gives everything he does his best. He’s steady and true. He’s the best father Ellen could ask for. And he still has that pure and powerful tenor voice that I love so much. I could ask for no more than all Tom is.