I think it is appropriate today to write about our Mothers.
Mine grew up in Chicago during the Depression. Her Father walked out to "greener pastures" levaing a 42-year old woman with 7 kids, the youngest was 2. Mom was # 5 surviving being born just a few months after the death of the previous #5 and grew up hearing why couldn't Harris have been the one to live?
She marries Daddy during WWII (just knew him from letters) and goes to live on the farm in WV. There she learned to cook, haul water, garden, can, milk cows, muck stables, work the hayfield, she already knew how to make do. While pregnant with her last child, she & Daddy built a cinder block house - from the ground up. She taught me how to sew, cook, bake bread, and by example how to be a decent person (as I hope I am). By example she showed what it was to be a parent - go to teacher conferences, be invoilved with PTA, be a room mother & chaperone, work the band boosters concession stand - and endure loneliness of being away from everything and everyone you loved and having no one to "talk" to. She also kept her word and when we kids were grown, she left, went back to Chicago area, remarried and continued being involved with the schools until the Big A robbed her of who she was.
Mothers of her era, as those who preceeded and actually endured more, had more starch & spunk in their little fingers than most of us have today. They, each generation, did what they could to make life easier for their children - and in many ways too easy because it is the hard times that give us spine.
Thank You, Mothers of the previous generations from the beginning of time.
