On a lighter note

But we mustn't fail to mention my mother's wonderful enchiladas, potato salad, and biscuits!

When I was growing up my mother wasn't a particularly good cook -- vegetables inevitably came out of a can, salad was lettuce/ tomatoes/mayonnaise, Campbell's soup got used a lot -- but there were a few winners, like the items mentioned above, and she was a great baker. We always liked it when she didn't have to work, because we would come home from school to the smells of her delicious cookies, pies and cakes. She made the best fudge I've ever tasted, with a slightly grainy texture. Back in the days when you could still hand out homemade goodies to trick-or-treaters, she would go to the trouble of making her fudge, or pop corn balls or Rice Krispies squares. At Christmas there were the good old-fashioned cookies shaped like Christmas trees and Santa Clauses, bells and reindeer, which she would let us help "paint." And on Easter morning we had the most elaborately colored hardboiled eggs to find, which she would have been up until 2 a.m. decorating (remember her artistic bent).

Every now and then a case of Let's-Move-the-Furniture would descend on Mother. I think she would just get bored, and decide the couch should go over there instead, the girls' room would work better if the beds were arranged thus and so, etc. In the piece that I and my siblings put together for the pastor to read at her memorial service, my brother said that sometimes they would come home to find their bedrooms were no longer even in the same room where they'd been in the morning! This would have been after I went to live with my father and stepmother at 17 -- I can remember coming home to a whole new look to my room, but not to an entirely different room.

Once my sister Ellen sent Mother a painting she'd done of yellow and white flowers which Mother loved and promptly had framed. She then announced in a letter to us all (until the last few years of her life she was very good about writing to her children, either in group or in individual letters, which were often very amusing) that now she had to make a new bedspread and repaper one wall to go with the painting.

Gary was really quite beautiful when she was younger -- I thought she looked like Ava Gardner, my brother thinks she looked like Susan Hayward -- but she was not averse to hamming it up in a photo, crossing her eyes or making some other face. One of my favorite pictures of her was taken in Alaska -- where she lived and worked twice, for a while as a secretary on the North Slope, with one of those unspeakable schedules of ten-hour days for 28 days straight, followed by one week off, which I considered barbarous but which she took in her usual stride -- and there is my normally elegant, perfectly dressed mother in a robe and baseball cap with the bill pushed back, standing at the stove, glancing back over her shoulder with an expression that suggests, "All right, Buster, don't give me any grief."

She could be fun, and funny. There was a strong streak of earthiness in this very proper lady. She liked her scotch, she loved to dance, loved picnics and backyard cookouts, she did a healthy amount of swearing, always stopping short of the 'F' word (when we were kids she washed our mouths out with soap for swearing, which we thought very unfair). She liked television's Judge Judy because she didn't stand for any nonsense. Until the last couple of years of her life she was very alive, full of energy, opinions, projects. The fact that poor health took all of that from her left her depressed, and made us all very sad for her. It was time for the dance to end.