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]