---
title: Improvement Era
description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930.
authors:
  - Cole, Lou E.
collections:
  - periodicals
tags:
  - magazine
  - improvement-era
periodical: Improvement Era
volume: 20
number: 6
published: 1917-04
publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations
publisher_place: Salt Lake City
language: en
type: magazine
reference: 'Lou E. Cole, "Staff of My Soul: A Poem," *Improvement Era* 20, no. 6 (April 1917): 526.'
source:
  url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera2006unse
  transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers.
  identifier: improvementera2006unse
start_page: 526
end_page: 526
rights:
  status: public-domain
  basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1917-04)
  source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera2006unse
  publication_year: 1917
  note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1917, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright.
---

# Staff of My Soul: A Poem

<!-- page:526 -->

Putting' Mother on thef' Shelf

                        By Ida Stewart Peay

                  —
     Mother Nile who was also grandmother and greatgrand-
                                        —
mother to a large and loving posterity was just getting to her
usual self again after the first protracted and serious illness of
her long life. At this moment she was gazing in the old dresser
mirror that had reflected her image almost daily for fifty years,
and it was nearly that long ago since it had pictured Tom's, as
he looked teasingly over her shoulder in the days of yore and
called his handsome young wife "a proud one."
    "Of course, I'm proud," she had owned mischievously in
those days gone by, as she laid her soft cheek against his, "who
isn't, that's worth a snap of your fingers?"
     "Of course, I'm proud," she admitted again, now, to her
solitary reflection, as she arranged the sheer, muslin collar attractively on her neat, gray gown. "I'm just as proud as I ever
    —
was hearts don't change much, after all; and I want Charles
to see that I'm on deck, pert as ever, and Jim's girl must
notice that her sweetheart's grandmother has some ambition and
'get-up' in her."
      When the good woman was at last ready and began to walk
with some thing of her old strength and briskness through the
 garden to her son Charles' home, she indeed made a "fine figure
of a woman," for even after all these years she was straight and
tall, and would tip the scales at one hundred and eighty pounds.
 Evidences of the power and purposefulness of her character
were still plentiful, yet, with the knowledge that she had passed
her seventy-fifth mile stone one might ordinarily be pardoned
for saying she had been a wonderful woman "in her day," but
 the development of this little tale forebears this last quotation.
 As she neared the broad veranda that stretched across her oldest
 boy's home, she was spied by her grandson, Jim, and the little
high school girl who had stolen his heart.
    "0 what a beautiful woman your grandmother is," exlaimed the sweet young thing. Then, as she and Jim, in the
humility of young love, went tenderly forward to meet the
venerable lady, the girl gasped more to herself than to any
one else and almost entirely under her breath, "O I'm sure she's
the Mrs. Nile my father talked about."
    The presentation followed immediately, and soon, seated be-