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.)