Mother's Day

A r-e-a-l long time ago, I was just a little girl when I hurt myself playing in the backyard and blood  gushed out from the pinhole-size puncture and I became hysterical and stood screaming and flailing on the lawn bringing my poor mother running out the kitchen door expecting to see sheer catastrophe.  Her reaction seemed cold as she wiped the dot of blood from my finger and told me to go play.  I doubted that she loved me as I watched her return to the kitchen.  When I was a teenager, I thought she was the most out of touch person on earth.  I wasn't allowed to go out on a school night and on the weekends I had to be home by 11 pm.  How unfair.  The grey hairs I must have given her.

Then as I grew up, she became smarter.  I remember her reading "By the shores of Gitche Gumee, by the shining Big Sea water.............." from The Song of Hiawatha, to us children as we sat around the table.  I can still smell the fresh-baked bread in the kitchen and see jar after jar of her preserved tomatoes, the hot grapes dripping from a hanging cheese cloth for grape jam, and her strength and common sense about life.  The older I got, the smarter she got.  She was and is still is my strength.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY to my daughter, my daughter-in-law, and all the other women who have influenced my life and helped me become who I am today.

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