Sarah can best be described as a faithful, hardworking wife and mother. Marrying at age 17, she was to become the mother of 5 boys and 2 girls. She truly lived for her children--sending them out the cleanest and most well-fed of anyone.

She was a good cook, and especially a wonderful bread maker. Though housekeeping was not her favorite thing, her home always smelled of delicious homemade yeast rolls (she called them buns). Hoeing in the fields, canning, cooking, washing, ironing, quilting; all things she did very well, but in memory many of us can hear her wonderful, hearty laughter, along with these words, "Come on in, I'm just getting hot buns out of the oven."

Sarah loved to sing, and was a long-time member of the Seminole Church of Christ.

Perhaps her greatest legacy is the many grandchildren who have such wonderful, fond memories of being spoiled by her.

- Janet Tate

"My most vivid memories of my grandmother, Sarah Irene Sealock Newell, are the smells from her kitchen. Her kitchen was just off the back porch in a white frame farmhouse which sat on the corner of two country dirt roads between Shawnee and Seminole.

When I was a little girl about six or seven years old, I used to hop in the front seat of Aunt Nona's red Volkswagen and drive to the farm with her on weekends. We'd leave after she got off work on Friday so it would be close to dark by the time we got to the farm.

In the winter, Grandma let me sleep in the 'front bedroom' under what I thought were hundreds of quilts because the wood stove and gas heater were in the other part of the house. In the summer however, I slept in the 'middle room' with the windows wide open hoping for a cool summer breeze.

On winter mornings when I awoke, I could hear the sizzle and smell the bacon frying in the kitchen. The smell, which filled the entire house, was so good and made me so hungry that I would dig myself out from under the quilts and run to the kitchen as fast as I could!

On summer mornings though I awoke to the sweet smell of lilacs. A row of lilacs lined the driveway on the east and west sides of the farmhouse. On those mornings with a light summer breeze, the aroma coming through the open window was intoxicating. I could have stayed in bed for days!

But my favorite smell came later in the day. If she could, my cousin Barbara Newell (George's daughter) would get to come to Grandma's and we'd go outside and make mud pies (using spoons we had stolen from the silverware drawer in Grandma's kitchen). When lunch time came and Grandma would yell for us to come inside, you could smell the yeast.

The smell of yeast meant that homemade bread was coming!

No one, but no one could make bread like my Grandma. She could knead that bread in nothing flat...punching the dough down and breaking off little round rolls of pure pleasure in one fluid motion...plop...the rolls go into loaf pans then into the oven!

The bread was at its best just out of the oven. It was warm and toasty...sweet and buttery...light and fluffy. And the smell. It was like no other. To this very day I have never, ever smelled anthing as wonderful as the smell of bread baking in Grandma's kitchen.

I can still see her standing on the back porch of the farm house waving 'goodbye' and telling us to come again soon. I wish I could."

- Reneé Davenport Mixon