This six-part series will celebrate "Everyday Life" and will run occasionally through November.

VIVIAN BROOKS stoops over the bean patch. She tosses what she picks into a plastic Food Lion shopping bag. A familiar green Honda pulls up.

"Somebody told me that you were out here in this heat picking beans," Mary Hall shouts over the steady whir of cars whizzing down Smith Station Road.

"Don't you know you're not supposed to be crossing that road?"

Brooks, 85, shakes her head.

"You know I ask God for his help in everything I do," she says. "If it be his will, he's going to let me cross that road."

How quickly time passes.

It seems weeks, not years, since Vivian Brooks was the one checking on older friends, bringing them a bag of turnips and driving them to church. Now it's her turn to lean on friends and family.

"I don't like to depend on people all the time," Brooks says later. She's sitting on the porch of her rambler, which overlooks the garden across the road. "But I'm blessed
and thankful that I have friends and family close by who allow me to keep my independence. I want to be on my own as long as I can."

The property on the busy Spotsylvania County road has been home to Brooks for
65 years. She and her husband, William, raised their two children in an old shingled cottage nearby that has since been torn down. Brooks had the rambler built after her husband died in 1965.

In earlier years, she took joy from digging in her own garden and canning or giving away what the family couldn't eat. Now she counts on her daughter, Norma Cook, who is 64 and lives next door.

The garden belongs to Cook's husband, Benny, and these days it's Norma Cook who does the canning. Brooks' son, William Jr., and his wife, Bert, live a couple of miles down the road.

Brooks has been a widow longer than she was married. Three generations call her Nanny--grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. So do her neighbors and the congregation at nearby Mount Zion Baptist Church.