Leaf it to the Girls

The cool thing about having a baby later in life.... is that you get to shift gears backwards. And now, things that might otherwise be considered drudgery, are back to being filled with wonder.

Like raking leaves.

So, now Emma wants to do the fun stuff, like being buried in leaves, leaping into piles of leaves, and tossing them up in the air. The girls took her out with them for the job, and Emma was right in the middle of things. Literally. So here's a few pictures from leaf-raking:

Darcie had no problem helping to bury Emma. In fact, I think she was getting a certain level of satisfaction out of it.
Alyssa was also in on it...
And then, there was the plot to hide from Mom when she came home from work. So Emma held very still while they covered her up....
And I showed the proper amount of shock and surprise. (You can see the start of our Christmas lights going up, including the wreath over the garage, and the ladder by the eaves)
Tossing leaves on the other person doesn't work quite as well when you're the one that's downwind. That's ok, Emma didn't know the difference.

Moving on to Christmas.......

The Gen-u-ine Article!

It's Saturday. I'm at home, in my own carefree world. But in the background, I can hear my mom in the kitchen. No, she's not cooking this time. Since it's Saturday, she's typing up the Sunday program for church. She starts with her primitive method of centering the title: counting the letters and spaces for the title, then backspacing half that amount from the center. I hear the even rhythm as she hits the space-period-space-period pattern of the lines between the words. Then, the uneven sounds and extra-loud thunk when she hits "shift" as she types the names and songs. Then, the "ding" of the little bell she comes within an inch of the right margin. And yes, I do hear the occasional colorful exclamation, uttered under her breath, when she makes a mistake.

Which was always worse on the Sunday program, because she was using a ditto master. I know -- it's an ancient term for a post-industrial revolution method of duplicating documents. Does anyone else remember those old purple-inked copies??? There was no way to correct a mistake, not even with correction tape. And if she was having a rough day, she would have to give up and start over with a fresh master. That was the ultimate waste in her eyes.

Her method of attack always involved this:

Yes, that's an old manual typewriter. In fact, it's the SAME old manual typewriter that my mom used all those decades ago. I believe this is probably from the early 1940's. Even after "modern" electric typewriters were invented, my parents still used manuals (we had two). Call me weird, but I did want to bring this baby home with me, on our recent trip to Utah/Southern Idaho. Like a lot of other things, this was still at my sister's house, along with so many other things that were my parents'. Since no one else had expressed an interest, Karen sent it out the door with me. I would have taken the wood-and-metal stand it was on too, but we were out of room in the Suburban. Next trip.

My kids thought it was pretty cool, and had to try it out. There's a big difference between typing on this old hulk and typing on a modern computer keyboard. About the only thing in common is the QWERTY layout!

I LOVE these keys! And I love the wear marks from where countless times one of us rested our hands on the edges. And even though I thought it was kind of dumb at the time, I get a kick out of using the lowercase "L" for the number "1", because there is no "1" on the keyboard. (An exclamation point could be made with the apostrophe and a period!)

Mom, being the organized person she was, typed a lot of things. She typed up minutes from meetings, ward newsletters, recipes for her collection-cookbooks, and she typed letters. She actually preferred typing to handwriting. I still have a few of those typed letters. I also have recipes on 3"x5" cards that I typed on this typewriter. They were Mom's recipes that I wanted to have with me when I left home for college.

It may be unnecessary to have this old typewriter. But I'm hooked. And it is a link to both my parents: my mom, the typist, and my dad, the printer. And it adds to my modest little collection of antiques.

TOTALLY cool!!

P.S. Maybe you remember this post, that showed a few of my antiques, and antique wannabes.

In Memory

It's never easy to lose someone who is close to you. Despite all I know, and all I believe and the comfort that gives me, when it comes down to it..... I miss my mom.

Earlier this month, on September 5th, my mom passed away quietly in Pocatello. She was nearly 82 years old. Her health had been declining for some time now, but still she held on. When I spoke to my sister a few days before, and she described Mom's condition, I felt that I needed to be there.

Bless Todd for making that possible. He set everything aside for us to make the long drive to Pocatello, leaving almost immediately. And it was fortunate, because I was able to be there with both my sisters, when Mom slipped away. I am forever grateful that I was there with her, even though she did not know me or any of us. She could not respond to us, but we could talk to her and tell her how much we loved her. It was enough.

My mind does not bring back images of her in the last months, or even the last couple of years. I see her as she was when I was a child, and she was younger, and vibrant, and anxiously engaged in so many good works.

I see her sitting in her chair with her needlework, or working in the church kitchen for ward dinners, or in any of the countless tasks she performed. I see her leading music, baking bread, hanging laundry on the lines, or working in the church library. I see her canning peaches, playing the piano, preparing a lesson, or ironing pillowcases. (Yes, my mother ironed pillowcases!)

In my mind, she is driving. Not because she enjoyed it (which she didn't!), but because it needed to be done. She is driving a carload of kids to Tuesday afternoon Primary, a handful to early morning Seminary, on a temple trip, or home from the grocery store.

She is lotioning her hands. Not because she was vain about her looks, but because she had spent so much time scrubbing, that her hands would be painfully dry and cracked without lotion.

She is making a banana milkshake for my dad on a sunny afternoon, after school and work is over. She does this little act of love and service for him, as he studies in a 3" thick binder so he can learn to operate the new machinery at work (he was a printer), and therefore keep his job.

She is reading. For hours and hours, she would read. Her love of books was passed on to her children.

She is curling my hair. It's Saturday night, so my hair needed to have curls for Sunday. No electric curling irons for us -- this was with old-fashioned rollers. Later, she'll wash and set her own hair with bobby pins into pincurls. Mom never changed her hairstyle in all of her adult life. Ever.

She is sewing. There's no money for a new Easter dress, so she'll make one for me herself. It is some pastel-colored creation that I will wear with white patent leather shoes on Easter morning.
I wish I had known her when she was quite young. I love photos of her from that era. This was her engagement picture, in 1947:

This is how I see her:

I thanked my mom many times for all that she had done for me. She would shrug it off, uneasy at accepting praise. She reveled in her posterity, though, and always wanted to know what the grandkids were doing and how things were going. She measured success not by her own accomplishments, but by the accomplishments of her descendants.

She held fast to her beliefs and her testimony at all times. She was never demonstrative about it, but we kids were never in doubt about how she felt. She taught us well. In any situation, I could know how my mom would feel about it. There was never any question in her mind, or ours.

I wonder about my own role as a mother. Am I teaching my kids what my mom taught me? Will they value the things which are most important in life? Am I conveying to them my own beliefs, as surely as I knew my mom's? Will they continually strive for improvement because they know their mom is hoping and praying for them?

I hope so.

Rest in peace, Mom. You can finally rest.

with much love,