I don’t know why some people are more fascinating than others.  Sometimes I just fall in love with a person or a couple and study their lives, their era, and try to imagine what their lives were like.  Sometimes I seem obsessed with finding out every detail about the people that occupy my thoughts.  I think it is so amusing to learn even minute details about their lives.  My son calls me a romantic.  He is kind.  Others call it weird.

It is so cute that Zelda called Scott D.O.  I still haven’t found out what that stands for.  Maybe only Zelda and Scott knew.  She was known for being in competition with her husband even though she loved him very much.  I think she sometimes had good cause to be jealous of him.  On more than one occasion he took lines that she had written and used them in his stories.  She would be reading one of his stories and there bigger than day, she recognized something she had written to him in a letter or in her private journal.  She longed for some of the attention for contributing to his success.

I absolutely love the review she gave about Scott’s book The Beautiful and the Damned”.  The publishers asked her to review it mainly for publicity reasons to help book sales.  She used her honesty along with wit to write this hilarious review.  It was so good that they later offered her another job to write an article.

This is what Zelda wrote~

“Buy this book for the following aesthetic reasons: First, because I know where there is the cutest cloth of gold dress for only $300 at a store on 42nd Street. And also, if enough people buy it, where there is a platinum ring with a complete circlet. …”

After citing a few more choice items that might come her way if the book sold well, she ends with a playful (or maybe not) admonition to her husband:

“It … seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald — I believe that’s how he spells his name — seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.”

A sweet christian couple, very much in love, married and took up housekeeping in a house in the Beaverdam community of Haywood County, NC.  Joseph lost his daddy at a young age and then lost his mamma when he was a young adult.  When his mamma died he inherited a piece of his parents’ land and built a little farmhouse on it. It still stands today in the mountain community sparsely populated along Sorrel’s Creek.

Over the years the couple had a wonderful family and raised them properly with love, discipline, and respect.  They prayed for their children and for their children’s children and the generations still to follow.  Joseph, being a servant of the Lord and loving to study the Bible, became a strong man in understanding the word.  He became a great Sunday School teacher at their church.  It was called Laurel Grove Baptist Church.

On April 1, 1956, after a long Godly life of service to his Lord, wife, and family, Joseph was called home.  It was befitting that he was called home while he was at the little church he had served and loved so much.  After Dovie lost the love of her life, she asked the Lord for strength and carried on. She always looked forward to being in heaven with her Lord.  She dreamed of the day she would see Joseph again, to reunite and spend time together in paradise where death would never separate them again.

On December 7, 1965,  Dovie was resting quietly by herself on the front porch of the farmhouse.  She is pleasantly startled with something or someone that we still wonder about today.  She calls to inside of the little farmhouse, “C’m here, come see who has come for me?”   We don’t know what she saw that day, because when they came out to see, Dovie had peacefully passed away. I think the Lord allowed Joseph to escort her home that day so they could live in paradise with their Lord forever.

 The apartment is finally finished!