Mommy

A late Mother's Day note

Look at how fierce my mother is. 

Those sunglasses are boss. My parents were in Cape Canaveral in 1969 to watch their high-school friend Rusty Schweickart be launched into space on Apollo 9.  

This was back when men wore suits and hats and women wore dresses for occasions of importance. I even remember as a little girl having to wear a dress to fly from Newark to Cleveland to visit my grandparents. It would never have occurred to anyone to wear shorts or yoga pants on a plane. What kind of reprobate are you? On the other hand, they smoked on flights back then, so maybe change isn’t all bad. 

Back to my mother. 

She was a farmer’s daughter, attended college for two years, and then married and had three children, the youngest of which was me, at least for a while. 

My mother was not a city girl. She grew up riding the backs of dairy cows as my grandfather brought them in from the pasture for milking. My grandfather used to tell her and my Aunt Mary to stay out of the barn—they might get hurt in there. 

Soon after this photo was taken, my mother went back to school to complete her college degree and become a teacher. She got pregnant in the last year and was “out to here” during her student teaching. In one special-needs class, a little boy asked if she was having puppies. His experience with large bellies was limited to the family dog. 

My mother persevered and can be seen in photos holding my newborn baby brother in her graduation gown. I was almost ten years old. 

She taught for twenty years, earning a reputation as a phenomenal educator. She loved her students and her passion for English (and science, but mostly English) showed. I inherited my editor gene from her. She didn’t just teach proper English—she spoke it my whole life and still does. If you ever want to understand the difference between lay and lie, hang around my mother and you’ll hear them used correctly in real life. 

She wrote poetry, did a short stint as a runner, and she is a wonderful cook. She is one of the few women I know who worked full-time and still put a homemade meal on the table every night. Thanks to her, I know how to bake a pie from scratch, including the crust. 

My mother fly-fished

and rode and handled horses, including volunteering at a horse camp for disabled children.

My mother was brave. She and my dad (also a teacher) packed up four children in a station wagon and a 15-foot trailer and gave us memories for a lifetime traveling around the country seeing everything we could cram into three summer-long vacations. Here she is canoeing on Lewis Lake in Yellowstone National Park

and Sibley Lake in the Bighorn National Forest (Wyoming).

We cooked almost exclusively over a fire, mostly whatever we caught that day, did dishes with water that had to be hand-pumped out of the ground, and took showers and did laundry once a week if we were lucky. Other than that we got clean in ice-cold mountain streams. Yet somehow my mother always looked perfectly put-together, and she made sure we saw and appreciated all the natural beauty America has to offer. I know it wasn’t the easy way to spend the summer, but my brothers and I will always treasure the memories from those years.

If I had one criticism of my mother, it would be for letting me wear this coat.

What on earth? This was apparently before clothing manufacturers figured out how to not make a pointy hood and also that orange, pink, and yellow don’t look good together on anyone.

One last thing: my mother is a bird lover. She has been keeping a notebook for decades that lists every species of bird she’s ever seen and there are a lot. She has made sure all of us children have several bird books and good binoculars, and my daddy has built us all bluebird boxes, which are not just any old box. Bluebirds are finicky and want the holes to be a particular size and the box to face a certain direction. My mother is the only one I know who describes baby birds fledging as “exciting.” I definitely got the bird gene from her. Just last week we sat on her back porch and watched birds come to the birdbath in her yard and it was a lovely way to spend an afternoon.

At almost 88, my mother still takes incredibly good care of herself, it just takes a little longer. Daddy says she won’t come out in the morning until she’s perfect, and I think she’s earned that right.

I’m sure she wasn’t perfect, but she was perfect for me. Thanks, Mommy. Love you all the way to Montana and back.