Saturday, May 07, 2005

Mother's Day


My mother, in her youth.

My mother is the nicest person I have ever known.

Some things about my mother:

She grew up on a farm, and had to work in the fields every day. But her father believed strongly in education. So if the kids were studying, they didn't have to work. (They did a lot of studying.)

When she was a little girl, she had Scarlet Fever, a disease in which (among other things) your skin turns red and peels. She thought that when all the old skin peeled off, she’d get a new name. The name she wanted was “Marthateen".

She left home at age 15.

She was the first in her family to earn a college degree.

My father used to say that he had to pester her into marrying him.

She first worked at the Power company, then was a high school teacher until I was born.

She is very crafty, but can also do things like building cabinets, laying rock for patios, and repairing garage doors.

Until recently, she did all her own yard work, and always got up on the roof to clean the gutters... well into her 70s.

She can run rings around me.

Digging through my grandmother's closets as a teenager, I learned two things about my mother that she'd never told me:

She learned to fly an airplane before she learned to drive a car.

She did, despite repeated assurances to the contrary, have a middle name. One she despised. Since I hated my middle name through all of grade school, I could relate. (Hers was way worse than mine.)

9 comments:

Maktaaq said...

She is beautiful!

She could fly a plane? What decade?

Niobium said...

Ok, now you have to tell us what the middle names are.

Johnny C. said...

Your mom sounds pretty amazing.

I'm afriad to get on the roof in my 20's let alone in my 70's.

I like your blog. Count me asa regular.

Charles said...

beautiful. and I love the tones in that image too.

Rurality said...

Thanks everybody. Yes she is amazing! And I think she's very pretty too but of course I'm a bit biased. :) Sadly my sister is the one who inherited her looks, and I look more like my father's father.

The plane flying was in the 40s - probably après la guerre but I'm not sure - I'll have to ask her. She said she didn't keep flying because it was too expensive. Her little brother ended up being a pilot in the Air Force, and her sister's husband and their three sons all flew planes, so maybe it's in the blood on that side of the family. I used to love flying (as a passenger), but nowdays I'm a nervous flier.

I could tell you the middle names in question, but then I'd have to kill you! I might be next on the list because I'm sure my sainted mother would want to kill me if I disclosed hers on the internet. Mine is not actually bad, I like it fine now, I just didn't like it as a kid. I had several ancestors with the same name so I guess my parents were covering all bases.

Karen Schmautz said...

What a wonderful tribute to your mom.

Rurality said...

Well I talked to Mom tonight and asked her about the flying. She reminded me that she had been in the Civil Air Patrol in Atlanta during the war. She said that mostly they put on uniforms and marched all around. Anyway, that was what got her interested in flying, and she learned during the war, when she was about 16. Not long after that, she decided to go to college, and then couldn't afford it anymore.

Anonymous said...

I left my comment at No Direction Home, through stupidity. I like your pictures, your mother's tale, and I will visit again


thelrd in TEXAS,

urban, not rural, although zebras, llamas, deer, are on properties on my dog walk.

Maktaaq said...

Wow! She was cool.

Must be VE Day or that it's the Year of the Veteran, but I feel a full-on WWII obsession starting.