Mom

Raised on a farm with 11 brothers and sisters, she was schooled in
a one room school house that is preserved as a historical site in
Middleton, Wisconsin: This woman was wife, mother, grandmother, lover
of nature, protector of birdies and squirrels. Her life a stoicism,she
was a force of nature, ethics, creativity, and raw inner strength
rarely seen in this realm any longer. Imperfect. Flawed. Humorous.
Hard working. My mom.

Believer in the belt to the bottom when needed. In church every Sunday
almost her entire life. Late for everything. A and B equaled C on
Monday, and could equal X by Tuesday. She defied logic. Yet, the
clothes she made for us were the envy of the neighbors. The vegetables
and flowers she grew in our tiny suburban plot of land amazed the
neighbors. We could not understand it then.

She took in abandoned cats, and rushed injured wild life to the vets.
She tried to save baby rats and bunnies found in the shrubs. She
openly wept at the funeral of our turtle and gold fish, and buried
them with dignity in a sacred spot amongst the fields and prairies
surrounding us.

She raised 4 children, teaching them to love reading and music. She
sang opera and taught us the piano and made sure we practiced every
day for an hour. Arlene. Her name was Arlene. And I was Lisa. Lisette
Ann when she was about to give me a scolding.

She urged us on in all our endeavors with encouragement and positive
reinforcement: keeping every wisp of paper from kindergarten on...Tiny
metals and ribbons, drawings, paintings, and tiny teeth, wisps of hair,
and our first attempts at printing, our poetry and school reports, kept
neatly in boxes. Never abandoned in any move. Treasures to the end.

She read to us every night after playing the Three Bears Marching song
as we marched to bed. We could not wait to hear more of Raggedy Ann and
Raggedy Andy, The Wind in the Willows, and a myriad of other books she
delighted us with.

Her dimensia slowly progressed. We thought nothing of being asked
to find the thing a ma jigger, or being called MaGuilicuty. Her
graciousness never left her except when she had sun downers syndrome,
before we placed her on meds. (Then someone was surely a horses ass.)
Her diplomacy, from this simple farm girl, was astounding.

She even let me bring my ferrets over on the weekends for years. She
never said she disliked them. She never made a face. But she never
wished to hold one. I would ask her, and she would reply that they were
so lovely in her old hands, but that they made her hands feel so aged
and spotted. How gracious she was up until the very end of her life.
It ended this morning around 3:20 in the morning.

This morning, Life Forces thunder past me like stampeding cattle.
Someone is telling a joke. Someone is having a baby. Someone is zipping
off to work. Years spent caring for her. Years of guilt for each day I
was not there for her. I look up stuck in this place. There is only the
horizon.

[Posted in FML 6418]