Another Mother's Day gone by....
On Sunday, I dug out my old photo album to look for a picture of my mom and me to post on Facebook.
The album is falling apart. Mom put it together in the early fifties, judging from the scrapbook cover with the pink poodles. She used those little corners that you lick and place around the photo to keep it in place.
The good thing about this method is that the photos remain in good condition, and they can be removed for scanning.
The bad part is that I remove the photos and sometimes don't put them back. The other day, I saw one of me on my cousin Elaine's pony Polly, just lying loose on my sewing machine upstairs. (the picture was lying on the sewing machine--not my cousin's pony Polly...ew, gross! After all these years, Polly would have lost much of her charm...)
I chose several photos to scan. Of course, they're all black and white. That's what we had back in the forties, when the pictures were taken, in case younger readers might be wondering...(As if "younger readers" would be reading this story..)
Little did I know, back in those innocent years, that I would NOT be an "only child"!
Much to my chagrin, my younger brother David came along 4 1/2 years later, and shortly thereafter, my brother Tim followed. They were two peas in a pod. What one didn't think of, the other did.
"How cute!! Are they twins??" people used to ask, as the boys ran around in their cute little red, white, and blue striped blazers.
Double trouble--that's what they were.
If David jumped off the roof of the garage, Timmy had to jump, too. If David climbed a tree and rode the branch through the air, Timmy had to take his turn.
Thing was--David was indestructible. Timmy's poor little bones must have been as brittle as an old man's. He broke a leg before he was even old enough to go to school, and he broke an arm before he was ten, I think.
The arm was broken in the playground of the old Boyd School near Pyletown. Timmy, as usual, was trying to follow his older brother in the country game of "tree branch flying," or whatever they called it back then.
My sister came along when I was ten, and we all loved her to pieces. Daddy called her "angel."
I was fourteen, when my brother Mark was born, so, of course, I spoiled him rotten.
I look back on my family and realize that Mom had her last child when she was 33, about the same age as I was, when I had my first. Her entire married life with my dad was spent raising children.
Those were happy years, filled with all the sorts of improvised games and childhood activities that kids did, back before video games. We thought an Etch-a-Sketch was amazing.
We played outside with neighbor kids, when we lived in town, and, when we lived in the country, we explored the old barn, worked in the garden, or took care of chickens.
Television didn't come along until I was in the sixth grade, and it was a marvel in living black and white. I was greatly enamored with Perry Como. What a handsome man and smooth crooner!
My brothers and I would go down the alley to the Weeks Theater, our dimes in our pockets, and watch the Saturday morning serials. Ah, there never was such a wonderful hero as Lash LaRue!
During that period of time, when we lived in the beautiful old brick house on Elm Street, my bedroom walls were plastered with pages torn out from the movie magazines that could be bought for a dime. A young, rebellious Marlon Brando figured prominently in the decor of my room.
Mom was always "Mom," a force to be reckoned with. In later years, one of our childhood friends told me how much she admired our mother.
"It was so much fun to go to your house, because your mother allowed you such freedom," our friend said. "No matter how wild things got, your mother could always sit with a cup of coffee and relax. Our mother had to always be controlling us!"
That might be so, but woe be unto to us, if we got in a dispute and caused a fuss! Mom would lock her knees into "stomp," and we would hear her coming down the hall!
"It's your fault!" I would whisper to my brothers, but we knew that we were ALL "gonna get it!" No more fun for the rest of the morning!
Mom passed away in 2006 at the age of 84. I was shocked, because I really believed she would live forever. Don't we all secretly believe that?
Every Mother's Day, my sister and brother David put flowers on her grave at a rural cemetery near Springfield, Mo. The cardinals sing in the pine trees nearby, as she would have wanted.
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- -- Posted by Dexterite1 on Tue, May 20, 2014, at 10:27 AM
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