For My Dear Mother, May 2009

So Good

My mother has always had an easy life. She weighed about four pounds when she was born and got to have her own bed…a shoebox on the oven door. She only had to walk four miles to school (while wearing a dress), sometimes even getting a horse and sleigh ride in the winter.

She got to gather all the dirty clothes in a blanket, like Santa delivering gifts, every Monday doing “the wash” in a wringer washer…got all that exercise and fresh air to boot by hanging clothes on the line out back. Sometimes on Tuesdays we even “helped” her with the ironing by doing handkerchiefs and pillowcases.

We let her darn our socks on a light bulb because she was so good at it. We let her stoke up the stove on cold winter mornings before we got up because she was so good at that, too. We let her off hauling one load of hay each day so she could go make a big dinner, and she was pretty good at having it all cleaned up before we went back out, as well.

All she had to do on the farm was that hay hauling…oh, and hay raking, and hay bale-turning, and the laundry and cooking; bathing us all in a galvanized tub and putting bobby pins in all our hair…and sewing doll clothes and flatfell-seamed flannel pajamas for us for Christmas, and helping us with school projects and volunteering for Clifton’s 24th of July potato-peeling, sorting potatoes, making bread and butter pickles with hand-peeled scallions, replacing the wallpaper every couple of years, making bread by hand, having her “club” once a month, being the ward Sunday School secretary for 60 years…little stuff like that because she was so good at it, you see.

We let her plant a huge garden and tend it mostly by herself because she was so very good at that too, you know.

She’s voted, done visit teaching and made fudge till she had forearms like Arnold Schwartzenegger. She still Mothers and Grandmothers us and we love her so much! She’s very good at that, too, real good!

Love, Kay
Mother’s Day 2009