A Tough Old Bird – Two

Every time we moved, Mom would take it in stride, pack up our belongings, and make sure the move happened.  I think as kids, we never really understood what hardships she endured, every time this occurred.

We lived in Florence, Colorado.  “Across the tracks.”  Actually, right by the train tracks.  I’m guessing that we must have learned to live with the sound of the trains passing by, night and day.  It was in my fifth grade class in my Florence school that I learned an important feature of being a teacher.  Every day, the teacher read classic stories to our class after lunch.  Books such as The Secret Garden.    Every day!  That, I think is when I learned to love reading.

 I wondered how my mother took all of those moves in stride.  I never heard her complain.  In fact, I never heard her complain – period!  Wasn’t she every disappointed.  Didn’t she have feelings that got hurt?  Sister Clara reminds me that Mom’s thinking must have been, what good would it do to complain?  You just  have to go on living, anyway.

When we lived in Florence, in a house that had been moved from Ludlow, Colorado.  It was there when the massacre happened and had bullet holes to prove it.  On an Easter morning, my mother and father brought home a newborn baby.  Sister Ethel was with us that weekend and, since sex was never a discussion in our house, I didn’t realize that she  was expecting a baby.  It was her baby that my parents brought home that Easter morning.  Again, my mother took having this newborn join our household in stride.  For the first several years of her life, she lived with us just as a little sister would.

We eventually lived in Pueblo, again, where we were joined by, yet, another of Ethel’s children.  Two daughters living with us as sisters.  And, then, a third came to us.  What kind of disappointment and heartbreak must have been felt by my mother at these times?  During those years, it was assumed that the mother with such a daughter was at fault for the daughter’s behavior.  Another disappointment; yet, we all loved the grandchildren.  Ethel married some time later.  A good man by all accounts.

My mother’s effect was felt by so many children.  She cared for the two daughters of a music teacher.  For all intents and purposes, she raised them.  She also cared for sister Jackie’s five children (four boys and a daughter).  She spent so much time “raising” them, as well.   When sister Clara’s son, Sean, was born, she also cared for him while his mom worked.

 My own daughters loved going to her house.  Because there was a shortage of beds at Grandma’s house, the children were allowed to sleep on the floor – camping out.  I remember that one of Jackie’s boys asked his mom what was for supper.  When she replied that she wasn’t sure, that she didn’t have much in the house, he told his mother that he wished Grandma was cooking supper that night, because she could make something out of nothing better than anybody else.

And, she could.  And, she could live on nothing, better than anybody else.  When my father died, my younger sister Clara was the only daughter at home.  They lived with practically no income.  Clara worked while attending high school.  That helped.  I have always been ashamed that our other sisters and I did not help financially.  Not, that my mother would have accepted help.  She was independent and tough in that way.

I remember as a young child, she drew single-cell cartoons.  They were clever and funny.

My mother was a pioneer.  She was born before telephones.  Before natural gas in every home.  She saw the development of airplanes.  Of space ships.  She saw men walk on the moon – albeit, she always said that they really walked in Arizona.  She worked every day of her life.  She was part of the future of the 20th Century beginning in the first year, 1901.  She traveled very little, never out of the country.

She organized club activities for herself and other women.  They played cards.  Dressed up in holiday costumes.  Taught her grandchildren to play canasta, never giving them a quarter.  The object she taught was to win. 

She was an independent thinker and taught her daughters to be independent women and make sound choices in life.  Her belief about children is that you cannot put an old head on young children; so, they had second and more chances to correct their mistakes.  I remember that when I started working in high school (I think all of us daughters worked in high school), I was required to pay her fifty cents a day to live in her house.  We learned independence and responsibility.  There was “no free lunch.”

After our father died, she met Tom, a man who clearly cared greatly for her.  She had been going to the Senior Center for lunch and card games … and  dances.  Tom could not dance, so my mother told him that she would teach him to dance.   They courted for years and went to dances.  Old-people dances to be sure, but they would dance together until the last dance.  The last time she saw him, they had been to a dance in a town fifty miles away from their homes.  Tom delivered her home and was found the next day on the floor in his apartment’s bathroom.  Another crushing disappointment.  I think she had been with Tom for about twenty-three years.

A cancer invaded her body; it was a cancer that lived in the fluids around her heart and lungs.  For the first time in her life, she was in a hospital.  The treatment was excruciating, but she suffered through; the treatment was done twice.  Clearly, she was not ready to die.  Out of the hospital, she resumed some of her activity (such as bowling – she loved to bowl).  I think that this activity helped to keep the cancer from advancing across her chest cavity, solidifying all of the organs in her chest.  Then came the day when she was on her way to bowl and caught the heel of one shoe under the toe of the other.  She fell, breaking her hip – the beginning of the very end.  For the second time, she was hospitalized for surgery for the broken  hip.  She was not very mobile, and she lived with Sister Marie.  During this time, cataract surgery allowed her vision to improve immeasurably.  She was so excited.  Sisters Marie and Clara cared for her in the last days of her life.  Then, she was gone.  The matriarch – the tough old bird – who had cared for so many children, helping them grow to adulthood, was gone.  To this day, she is missed by those who knew her.

 Mom’s immediate and extended family was truly a family of immigrants.  English, German, Irish, Scot, Western Europe.  A great granddaughter’s husband from China.  And, even further back than can be told by today’s ancestry look-up.  My DNA says I am Neanderthal!

 Be Safe and Be Well
The Cranky Crone
Thoughtful comments are appreciated

This post was created with the help of sister Clara.