I have finally returned to my home following the death of my mother. She had lived a long full life and I think she was ready to pass the torch to the next generation. She was 92 years old and for the majority of her life she had been extraordinarily healthy for her age with the exception of severe arthritis in her hips, which made walking impossible. I think that being confined to her home and an electric scooter was a bit depressing for her in her later years and she had lost her sense of purpose. She couldn't go anywhere or do anything and she had always been a very active person. She enjoyed gardening and every year her flowers and food flourished it seemed even better than the year before. She had the "greenest" thumb I've ever seen. I certainly did not inherit it. I just look at a plant and it withers up and dies. In her younger years she was an avid hunter and fisherman. We located pictures of her with two shotguns and two large deer hanging beside her and others where strings of Northern Pike had been pulled from the Minnesota Lakes near where she grew up.
I learned so much from this woman who had been my mother by choice not by chance. I was abandoned on the steps of an Iowa orphanage in 1959 at the age of 8, along with 3 of my siblings, by my biological parents. One year later we all had a new farm home and new parents. It was a completely new experience but one full of everyday surprises. Hard work in the garden and collecting the turkey eggs at 5 am before school were just a couple of my duties. Those turkeys were bigger than I was. Scared is not even the right word to describe my fear of them. But she taught me how to get the egg out from under a big scary turkey without letting it bite me. Living on a farm in the '60's and 70's was not like it is today. We butchered chickens, turkeys, and hogs as well as cattle. We milked cows, and fed orphaned lambs with a pop bottle. Packaging meat for the freezer was one of my jobs. We canned bushel baskets full of tomatoes, apples, beans, peaches,...you get the idea. One day of the week was bread baking day and that was what we did the entire day. Loaf after loaf of white and wheat bread and dinner rolls too. Most of it was frozen for use at a later time. Sometimes she did it herself and we had the best oven baked hot rolls with butter when we got home from school. We looked forward to that day. She was a very hard worker and taught us the value of a hard days work. If you weren't tired at night you hadn't worked hard enough. In the evenings it was story time. Sometimes she would tell us silly stories from her own childhood or read to us from a huge stack of children's story books. While we had a TV it wasn't the center of our lives. Singing silly songs, telling stories, making up stories, playing cards, dominoes or scrabble were evening entertainment.
It seemed to me that she knew everything. Along with the things already mentioned she was a great carpenter and taught me how to finish and refinish wood furniture. When we built the new house, I finished all of the woodwork, under her watchful eye - no small task. She was the most versatile and intelligent woman I've ever known and she never stopped learning. In her later years she read constantly and was always up to date on current events. She didn't read novels, she read Science Digest, The Smithsonian Magazine, Newsweek, Time, National Geographic, and Discover Magazine. Things that would teach her more. You would think that at her age she would want to just read novels and relax but that wasn't her style. She kept herself so well informed on matters of importance that if we had a question about anything we went to mom and she always had an answer. Now the torch passes to us and I don't think any of us can fill her shoes.
When we started going through her things we found a complete folder of stories and poetry she had written when she was young. It is very good thought provoking writing in this day when life is so complicated. She lived in a simpler time when a beautiful pink and purple sunset made you smile and you went to bed at dark so that you could be up to meet the sunrise. We were thrilled beyond words to find it and the lot of us-her children and grandchildren sat on the floor in the living room of her home and passed the pages from one to the other. Tears were shed, smiles and laughter were evoked and a sense of "WOW I never knew this side of her", were echoed all around. She had never told us of her attempts at writing.
I could go on and on about her atributes but I think I will end this here and write more in the journal I am writing for my children to have when I am gone.
We will miss her but her memory lives on in we her children who will pass the information and stories to our children and grandchildren. Thank you mom for taking me as your own and giving me a lifetime of happy memories.
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