Ruth Thompson intends for her "upping rock'' to be a rock for the ages.
Ruth Thompson, 85, has made it clear to her children and other family members: When she goes, the rock stays.
She's talking about the "upping rock," which she says stood a century and a half or so ago in front of a stage coach stop on High Point Road. Guilford Memroial Park, a cemetery founded in the 1930s by her father, William R. Futrelle, now occupies the site.
Thompson grew up in a now-vanished house in front of the cemetery facing High Point Road. The rock stood near by.
"My mother loved that rock," she says. "I have loved it. When I was growing up that is where my imaginary playmate lived. Her name was Mamie."
The term "upping rock" means people stepped on the stone to mount horses or to climb into the stage or a buggy.
Everywhere Thompson has moved, the rock has gone with her.
It now stands in beside her home in southwest Greensboro, although she rarely gets to see it anymore. She's a patient at the Wesley Long Nursing Center on Mackay Road, close to where where she first discovered the rock.
"I've told my children, it's not to go out of the family," she says.
The only other use of the rock she'd allow, she says, would be to return it to its original place at the cemetery "and make it a memorial to the horse and buggy years."