In January of 2020, I posted this picture on social media.
The Woman in a Feather Hat, as I call it, was sketched by my grandmother, Georgie Robertson Nadler, for the 1910 LSU Gumbo yearbook. I added the yellow text.
My family bragged for years about Mama Georgie’s artwork in the Gumbo. From 1908 to 1911, beginning when she was 18 years old and ending when she married, Georgie Robertson was one of LSU’s hired illustrators. She was not an LSU student – there were only a handful of coeds there in those days.
When I posted the picture with the question, “Who will be left to remember?” I had a goal to write fictionalized versions of our family stories to share with my relatives. I wanted the younger generations to read the stories of our forefathers and to know where they came from, to know their roots, to know how they got here.
The remainder of 2020 did not go as I had imagined: The March stay-home order required me, as a high school math teacher, to quickly convert to teaching online; my planned retirement from teaching was finalized in June; in October, my first grandchild arrived, a healthy boy.
As the coronavirus pandemic took its hold on the world, my whimsical question of who will be left became real. Close family members and friends died, some from the coronavirus, others from natural causes. Several were alone when they took their final breaths because quarantine dictated that family could not be with them.
The question of who will be left to pass down the family stories haunted me, and as summer came and went, the task seemed more urgent. I would be the one to make sure the stories were remembered.
After posting the Woman in the Feather Hat, I have featured it on the cover of a short collection, Sugarland, Family Stories of the Nadlers and Robertsons in South Louisiana 1888 to 1911.
As unpredictable as the year 2020 was, it feels good to have a tangible gift for my loved ones.
