How she got her name: Of course she ended up being "Sissy". --What else would you expect with a name like "Virdelene"! Her nickname "Sissy" came from the important relationship in her childhood of being the big sister to so many siblings, and from having to be her mother's helper. I was told that she was my "chewer", meaning that she chewed food for me when I was a tiny toothless person. (Thank God for the modern convenience of readily available sanitary jars of Gerber baby food!) My father named her "Virdeline Minerva" because he was enthralled with studying Latin. He was the teacher at the one-room schoolhouse. That is how he met and fell in love with our mother. He was 35, and Ida Day was his 16-year-old student. He was six feet four inches tall, and Ida was barely five feet tall --Ida could walk under Green Berry's extended arm without touching it. His original plan was to teach in order to earn tuition money, while also studying Latin in preparation, and then go to medical school to become a doctor like his older brother Andrew. Marriage changed his plans. Instead he became a farmer and also regularly became a father to an ever-increasing crowd of offspring.
The most vivid of my stories about my sister Sissy is about her marriage. She was in her late teens when, first, her father died of The Great Influenza Epidemic, then her mother followed him in death within the year. Nine orphans remained, myself the youngest, barely two. The younger children were placed into the Georgia Baptist Orphan's Home in Hapeville, Georgia; but Sissy and Edna were considered too old to go to the orphanage. Sissy faced the dilemma by making a marriage of convenience.
Tully Kitchens, a local farmer (a little bantam rooster of a man), needed a wife to help him raise his two sons and to also help him run his farm. When his first wife realized that she was dying, she gave Tully the names of two local women whom she found acceptable to mother her sons. Sissy's was one of those two names. So, for very practical reasons, Sissy agreed to be Tully's helpmate.
The beautiful twist to this story's plot is that Sissy and Tully fell very much in love during the working relationship after their marriage. Tully was the love of her life. Much later when she was widowed, Sissy never remarried though she survived Brother Tully by a number of years. Sissy and Tully had four children together -- Mabel, Edward, Virgil and Emory.
My own children loved to "go to the country" (Twiggs County) to visit their Aunt Sissy when they were children. They loved the unpainted wooden farmhouse with the porch all the way around it with porch swings. They enjoyed having to draw water from the well in the yard. Most of all, they absolutely enjoyed the novelty of having to go to the outhouse instead of having an indoor restroom. My children thought poverty was cool.
After she became a widow, Sissy became a nurse's aid, working in a Seven Day Adventist hospital in Florida. In the evenings she was a live-in companion for a fragile, genteel elderly lady who could not live alone. Sissy died on a trip with her children, traveling from Florida to Middle Georgia for a Kitchen's family reunion. Sissy had diabetes and skipped lunch due to travel. By arrival in Macon, she was getting very sick and was admitted to a hospital where she died in a diabetic coma.