Betty Lynn Ready and Jerry Crane both began life from humble beginnings. Lynn Ready's mother and father divorced when she was only a toddler, not long after her Navy Sailor father returned from overseas and WWII. Her mother's second marriage would end not too many years later, following the loss of Lynn's only sibling, a half-brother, who succumbed to polio at the age of 3. Mom is herself a polio survivor and returning symptoms and polio syndrome also made life more painful during her final years.
Young Lynn Ready would often find comfort, respite and I think some degree of escape and calm in large bodies of water. Long a strong swimmer, she would years later swim the backstroke with my brother or I as toddler's standing atop her abdomen. Growing up in the south in a non-air-conditioned home, we were lucky to live next door to a pool (and the home of my paternal grandparents, Bud and Mary Crane).
Dad's parents would also later introduce us to another family favorite, Jekyll Island. Lynn Crane loved few things more than daily morning and evening walks along the beaches of Jekyll and Driftwood Beach. When retirement beckoned for Jerry and Lynn decades later, a Jekyll vacation home was sold and traded for the white sand and Gulf Coast beaches of St. George Island and a beach house there. And if it was possible, Mom loved the roar of the ocean waves and those beach walks even more.
In her heart of hearts, Shirl (a family nickname for Mom), would have probably preferred a beachside retirement. But all the kids and soon grandchildren were living surrounding metro Atlanta. Dad started looking closer than the coasts and found a lovely and huge river house overlooking rapids on the Yellow River, which forms the border to the east between DeKalb and Gwinnett Counties, as well as Gwinnett and Rockdale.
Soon declining health for Mom made long beach drives impractical and flights almost impossible, so Dad would begin hunting for a lakeside home and MORE water to admire and bring Mom more calm. It did not take long before he found a beautiful and warm manse perched high above Lake Sidney Lanier, in the affluent and well-established community of Harbour Point near Gainesville, Georgia.
As the pandemic fast approached in the spring of 2020, Mom and Dad decided to make a more permanent move to the lake house, with plans of riding out that storm. Not long after that move, a few badly timed unpacking decisions by Shirl were followed by a hard fall, broken hip and long ambulance ride back to her doctors at Emory in Atlanta, where hospitals were still admitting non-Covid patients and where emergency surgery was performed on Mom's badly broken hip.
Meantime Dad was becoming used to a quieter life, as he seldom left Mom during the times of that long spiral. At the river house as well as when overlooking Lake Lanier, he started to really treasure mornings on the decks with his coffee, and dog Chewy at his ankles or nearby. Mom would fully transition in mid-2022, and hopefully find a better view of us all from above.
Dad decided, before suffering many of his own health reversals, to make a full move to the lake as well. Jerry took his own serious fall, and followed by other surgical complications, he became a Hall County resident, at his home and as needed, further recuperating nearby in the home of my sister, Tanya, a talented Nurse Practitioner, who also calls lake country her home.
Mom can't join Dad for his morning coffee or birthday cakes on that deck anymore, but something tells me that she can more easily see his reflection, as he gazes down and out over that shimmering lake and harbor below. And at least from the smile he is often sporting when he comes back inside, I am also pretty sure he feels she is still with him or nearby. Best birthday love and wishes to you both, from your number #1 son.
