Geneva Hayes celebrates 101 years of exciting life

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While most of the Christian world was celebrating Easter on Sunday, April 17, 2022, Geneva Hayes had a little something extra to celebrate.

Hayes turned 101 on Easter Sunday, and her only wish was to have her family attend Easter services with her and to follow that up with dinner at the farm in the house she and her husband had built, in 1977.

“I told them that this year I didn’t want a big celebration,” Hayes said.

She was treated to a huge party held at Duck Pond Manor on her 100th birthday, which she said was nice, but she wanted something quieter this year.

Over the past 101 years, the world has changed. Hayes grew up in a home without any “indoor conveniences” and now not only does her residence have indoor plumbing but also a computer and internet. She began driving a car before driver licenses were required and remembers when she did get one - she just mailed in a payment, and they sent her a card. She has seen homes torn down and rebuilt, bridges crumble and be replaced with stronger ones. She has seen several wars, but says that fear isn’t something to live with and emphasizing that everything is in God’s hands.

Hayes said the secret to longevity (and at 101 she is still trying to catch up to her mother who lived to be 103) is to love the Lord and love your neighbor.

“That second one can be hard,” she laughed, “but you can love them and not love their ways.”

Hayes took time to reminisce about the past 101 years and laughed at many of the memories she keeps reminders of in her scrapbooks.

She has pictures of her childhood home where she learned to raise cows and chickens and pigs alongside her father. She has pictures of the cousins with whom she grew up.

 She has pictures of the first school she attended – Frasier’s Chapel School. She has pictures of high school classmates – some she almost missed out on meeting when she had to drop out of school after just six weeks at the high school because she didn’t have a car to get to town, and riding with a neighbor got her home past farm-chore time. Luckily, a year later with a new family car, she was back in high school where she met her husband and married him in the fall of her senior year.

She has pictures of her late husband, Willard Hayes, and even the first note he passed to her when they were in high school. She has pictures of the first apartment they shared in Washington D.C., where they would spend the first 32 years of their married life and raise their four children. She has pictures of the home Willard built her when they moved back to White County, Tennessee, in 1973.

She has pictures of her art studio where she painted China and taught art classes to other aspiring artists and local hobbyists. She has picture of her pets – including the cat Willard gave her as a 16th birthday gift.

She has pictures of her daughters who all grew up and found jobs in the medical fields, three of them becoming nurses. She has pictures of her daughters’ families, including the 10 grandchildren that proudly call her Me-Mom. She has pictures of her grandchildren’s families and the 10 great-grandchildren and three great-great- grandchildren who are all a part of her growing clan.

With every picture, Geneva Hayes has a memory, and each of those memories makes up the story of her life because, she has spent 101 years fulfilling her favorite saying by President Abraham Lincoln, “And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”     

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