Kay and Lynda Yeldell, mother and daughter, will slip away from Greenwood on Friday, but not without a backward glance.
Kay, whose husband was the Rev. Dr. Walter Yeldell, retired pastor of North Greenwood Baptist Church, has lived in Greenwood at her house on East Monroe since 1972.
"I have lived here longer than anywhere else in my life," she said.
"All the way around, it has been a happy experience."
Her husband was the Rev. Dr. Walter Yeldell, the retired pastor of North Greenwood Baptist Church. He died in 1987. But he was known for his affability, said the Rev. Bob Hatzfeld, one of the pastors at North Greenwood Baptist.
The couple met in Louisville, Ky., where she attended Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
"He was my pastor," she explained.
Kay and Lynda, 57, who moved to Greenwood five years ago from Austin, Texas, will reside in Maumelle, Ark., a community close to Little Rock. One of Lynda's sisters lives a mile from their new home, and another is eight miles away in Little Rock.
Maumelle was settled almost 200 years ago and, in the 1970s, became the home of a planned community with parks, trails and tree-sheltered houses. That attracted Kay, and her two other daughters had implored Kay and Lynda to move there.
"It's just a family that love each other," said Hatzfeld.
Hatzfeld has worked with the congregation's senior adults, an area in which Kay also has been particularly active in the past decade or so.
"She is the kind of person who goes all out to get involved in things and goes way beyond the call of duty in anything that she does," Hatzfeld. "People respond to her real well. She has the kind of personality that people love."
She recently retired as president of the LLL Club. This stands for "Live Laugh Love" or "Live Long and Like It," depending on the source. Both descriptions appear to fit Kay, who is almost 85 and full of laughter and love, friends say.
Sara Criss, a neighbor, said, "They are just happy people, and the whole family is that way."
Criss said, "Greenwood is going to miss them a lot when they leave. Lynda has just dived right in since she has been here."
Lynda loves history, so she served as a volunteer tour guide and board member for Cottonlandia Museum and helped new members of the Chakchiuma Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution trace and document their ancestry. She worked as a substitute teacher at Bankston Elementary School.
"Mother raised me to love history and family," Lynda explained.
Hatzfeld said, "They are personable, and they are giving people who do things for people and don't expect anything in return. I don't know anybody who doesn't like them."
The mother and daughter are not finding it easy to leave Greenwood. But, Kay said, "Things change, and time changes things."
And some of that is positive, she said. For example, Greenwood has a number of restaurants these days. Kay remembered how she and her husband could not find a place to eat lunch when they first visited the town 33 years ago.
They drove along West Park Avenue, but it had not yet been developed. They tried downtown, but they didn't see the Crystal Grill. "We finally went back and ate at McDonald's," she said.
