The Lady from Carolina: The Homespun Wife

As the wife of a Baptist minister, Homespun Wife Sherry found herself committed to supporting her family’s welfare. She felt called to make their home as comfortable and safe as it could be. There. Now you know the origin of that title: The Homespun Wife.

Sherry’s Early Years

Both Carolinas became Sherry’s stomping grounds as her Baptist minister father and family moved from church to church. A few of the parsonages later became her own family’s homes when she was a day-to-day homespun wife.
Growing up in Shelby, NC, not far from Charlotte, Sherry’s parents married while still in high school. Her father enlisted in the Army in 1963 and was sent to Vietnam while Sherry was quite small.
When he came back from Southeast Asia, he worked for a time at various jobs, but soon felt called to the ministry.
A memory of flashcards sticks with her, working with her ministry student father reading and repeating Greek and Hebrew letters. He did well in Biblical languages, and after ordination moved to a number of North and South Carolina Baptist communities.
Sherry graduated from Cherryville, NC, High School, then attended her father’s college, Gardner-Webb. There she majored in English and became active in student government and the school newspaper.

Intermission, the background of the Homespun Wife site

Her page, The Homespun Wife, began several years ago when she posted country and cozy paintings and photographs. John Sloane, for instance, is one of her favorites, and the images she posts are seasonal. Christmas and December of course is a great time to share “over the river” pictures. Now she sends out the snowy winter pictures, and some showing a comfortable living room and fireplace with the snow and cold outside the window. I kid with her that she needs to visit us in central Wisconsin and travel into Minnesota to see those snowy country images for real; not that common in her North Carolina.
She’s established quite a following, and I’m always amazed at the number of views and likes.. Sometimes she gets hundreds of likes and dozens of comments on Facebook, never writing anything with the paintings but responding graciously to comments made by her viewers. And yes, to me they’re her fans because they look forward to her postings.

Back to Sherry, Her Adult and Family Life

Back to Sherry’s life. Her husband to be, a ministerial student, won her over after a 2nd date. She earlier had decided not to get back into the life of a pastor’s daughter, now wife, but it appears that the two couldn’t resist.
Married in 1984 on Mother’s Day, she supported him through his master’s degree and doctoral ministerial studies. She didn’t graduate from college, a little bit of a regret I could tell from her notes to me.
Back to the first sentence at the top about the Homespun Wife. When they began their family together, she put forth the effort to be a comfort and foundation to and for her family. The idea of the homespun wife began years before her Facebook posts, but now we know the sincere origins of those words.
They served seven Baptist churches in the Carolinas, but ending back in Cherryville as their home base. Sixteen years. She’s happy to write that their four children graduated from Sherry’s high school, Cherryville.

More Thoughts on Nostalgic Images

The pictures she posts hit home for me because when I taught American history to 8th graders, we spent time studying nostalgia at Thanksgiving and even more at Christmas. The holidays are ripe for nostalgic behaviors and smells, foods, and winter scenes. I could tell that students enjoyed this cozy look at social history. Later a couple students came back and told me what they recalled. One year on the day before Christmas break, we read nostalgic poems and other writings by candlelight.
Also, one year I stapled an entire year of artist John Sloane’s calendar pages across the front of the room– January through December. This showed students what warm weather nostalgic paintings and scenes looked like; nostalgia isn’t just a cold weather idea.

Finding her page:  The Homespun Wife.

If you aren’t familiar with her Facebook page, type Homespun Wife on the top as a page to search for. If you’re not on Facebook, ask a friend or relative to do the search. I think you’ll like her photo/ painting collection on the Facebook blog site: Homespun Wife. There’s quite an archive of past postings. Below are two examples of nostalgic pictures she displays on her Facebook blog site.

Please sign up with your email address on the main page of this elkfarm blog. You’ll receive additional information and a photo email that I send every week.