Confession: Gary’s godmother, Stella, was married to a man named Arch. It shouldn’t be all that hard to keep those names – Arch and Stella – straight, but once I mistakenly called them Starch & Ella.

And it stuck.

Two more kind and decent people you’ll never meet. Stella was one of Gary‘s aunts who grew up here on the farm. The two of them were thick as thieves when they got together – sharing farm stories from long ago.

“Gary? Stella called me. She wanted to talk about soap,” said Gary’s uncle Thomas on the phone a year or two back. Gary admitted he’d brought up the topic, wondering if they made their own soap on the farm back in the 1940s. Two hours of farm talk later, he had his answer: They did.

Stella’s health began failing shortly after her husband of nearly 65 years died on August 21, 2021. She was just nine days short of turning 91 when she passed away last month.

Stella’s younger sister, Marie, had moved in to help the couple in their final years. Marie lifted a load from Gary’s tender heart when she told him, “The train has left the station with Stella on board. Arch is waiting for her at the other side.”

“Who put the nut in the casket?”

We were chatting with Tim, one of Gary’s cousins, waiting to enter the chapel for Stella’s funeral. A family member was intently moving from group to group asking insistently, “Who put the nut in the casket?”

It took a minute before Tim explained that Stella’s love of collecting and then shelling walnuts, pecans, and hickory nuts for baking treats must have been the reason to tuck one in with her. He admitted to adding a small bag of ginseng to her gifts for the afterlife, but not the nut.

We never did find out who placed that sizable hickory nut front and center along the seam of the open casket’s sky-blue satin lining. There was considerable story-swapping later, though, about Stella’s skill at cracking open a nut with the steady whack of a hammer and retrieving the meat in two solid pieces.

Intrigued, I started asking around about Stella’s recipes. Melinda (another cousin) was kind enough to send me one:

Hickory Nut Cake

1 1/2 cups sugar
2/3 cup butter
3 eggs, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
3/4 cup milk
2 1/2 cups flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup hickory nuts, chopped

Cream butter and sugar. Blend in well-beaten eggs. Add vanilla and almond extract; mix well. Sift flour, baking powder, and salt together and blend into mixture gradually with milk. Fold in nuts. Pour batter into two round 8-inch greased cake pans. Bake in 350° F. oven for 25 minutes.

As Arch and Stella’s many nieces and nephews reminisced, there was a common thread in that she could (and would) cook anything you wanted and Arch could (and would) repair anything that needed fixing.

With no children of their own, Arch and Stella warmly served as a second set of parents to so many. At Arch’s funeral, there was talk about his insistence that “I know a shortcut” whenever serving as chauffeur to two generations of nieces and nephews. The “shortcut” was always a considerably longer route, but a more scenic one than the highways in and around Louisville, where they lived.

Arch and Stella met at a dance back in the late ’50s.

… but first, Arch served five years in the Navy.

He was stationed in the Pacific from 1950 to 1955, during the Korean Conflict.

Here’s the Archer wedding photo:

The newlyweds worked hard, bought a house, and added a garage. Gary remembers they built it themselves: laid the block, poured the concrete, put up the trusses. They only asked for help with the exterior brickwork.

In the early 1960s, Arch and Stella bought a cabin on Rough River and enjoyed nearly every weekend there for decades, fishing and just enjoying life. Early on, the cabin was just four walls with holes cut out to let the sunshine and fresh air in. When wandering cows stuck their large, inquisitive heads in the windows, it was time to put some finishing touches on their cabin.

Arch was very handy. Whether he was tinkering around out in the garage, at the cabin, or building a billiards table from scratch, there was a smile on his face.

He even set up a key-making station in his basement:

A few years ago, they knew it was time to sell their beloved cabin. Gary says they literally hadn’t finished pounding the “For Sale” sign into the yard when someone driving by pulled in and bought it on the spot.

The cornbread recipe

For years, Stella tried to recreate the cornbread Arch’s grandma used to make for him. She searched for and tried dozens of different recipes, but never could match what Arch remembered so fondly. But she kept trying.

Funny thing, though, Stella never ate cornbread. Her childhood memory of cornbread was that her mother, Emma, would make a batch once a week to feed to the coonhounds. To Stella, cornbread was nothing more than dog food.

Stella Archer loved the great outdoors.

Whether it was hunting, fishing, or gardening, she was happiest outdoors.

Her married name was prophetic, as Mrs. Archer won many awards for her proficiency with a bow and arrow.

And what else made her happy? Gary remembers how she loved flowers. “Every kind of flower,” he told me a few months ago. “She told me even a dandelion made her happy.”

That memory helps explain the wonder in this photo:

… if you look closely enough, you’ll see the flowers propped up outside of their door are growing out of a crack in the pavement. Stella couldn’t bear to pull such a lovely “weed,” and Arch would never ask her to.

Here’s the video of family photos great-niece Sarah and her husband, L.J., put together for visitors to see last month when they came to pay their respects:

My husband always pictures his godmother and uncle as being together – two peas in a pod. “Arch always said ‘we,’ never ‘I,'” remembers Gary. We both greatly appreciate all the hours Arch put into researching our family’s ancestors. His notes add nuance to the government paperwork that only recently became available online.

Whether we call them Arch & Stella or, with a slip of the tongue, Starch & Ella, their many nieces and nephews know they are at peace and together again, the way they were always meant to be.

“Gary,” Marie announced when she called him the morning after her sister’s funeral. “Stella called – she made there it safe and sound.”

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