A New Year

I have not posted for a while. Holidays, family parties, lots of work (employment type work) . . . it is all the usual excuses. So here are a few thoughts about the holiday past and the memories it brought.

This was our first Christmas without Mom's physical presence. I say physical presence, because the past two Christmases Mom really had no idea what was happening. I am happy she was able to see our twin grandsons last year. It is a good memory of her last Christmas with us. And she was very animated when she realized "there are two of them." So it is that memory - the one of her visit with her grandsons - that we all hold dear.

Although I found Mom's absence very real this year, I also found it was far easier to remember the good times past than to dwell on the sadness of her absence. Little things came to mind...Mom making countless Christmas cookies and hiding them under her bed along with our Christmas presents. Mom leaving a bag of potato chips in the oven and setting them on fire Christmas day. Mom fixing beef stroganoff for our Christmas dinner...

So with those nostalgic thoughts floating around I've spent the past few days thinking about some of the things that are "so Mom."

Those memories are easy to conjure and little things will bring pleasant memories flooding back ... I found a hand-blown glass vase in a box of stuff the other day. It was one Mom had placed on the kitchen window sill. She had a variety of colored glass vases lining the window in our kitchen. It was a large window and faced west,offering a view of our backyard, the pasture, and beyond that the line of pine trees that stood in front of the neighbor's commercial greenhouse.

I placed the vase on my south-facing window sill and took a good look at my kitchen. It's small by anyone's standards. It has tiny, cramped counter space, cheap imitation granite counter tops and old worn cabinets. I thought about how cheery Mom's kitchen was and immediately began to feel sorry for myself.

And then I took stock of what the kitchen of my childhood REALLY was like. Mom had very little  counter top space -- just a few feet of space on either side of the kitchen sink. She had very few cabinets. Our kitchen did not boast an island, a plethora of cabinets or built-in appliances. In fact, one had to squeeze between the counter and the stove to reach into the small recesses of the back cabinet. When my younger sister and I helped Mom bake cookies one of us would stand on a chair on one side of her and the other would stand on a stool squeezed in between the stove and the cabinet.  The space was so seldom used I can't remember what Mom kept in the drawer in that corner of the kitchen.

In the opposite corner was our telephone. An old rotary dial thing. Beneath that was the typical "junk drawer." But that drawer also held a Bible storybook that Mom read to us from as our evening devotions after supper. (We had supper and lunch. I don't know why we never had "dinner").

But the fact of the matter is, when you walked into Mom's kitchen...you never noticed the lack of space. You saw clean. You saw no clutter. You saw whimsical decorations. You smelled cookies or cake baking.

Mom's kitchen also did double-duty as a laundry room. The washer and dryer were tucked into an alcove between the refrigerator and a broom closet. More cabinets were built over the washer and dryer and Mom kept laundry soap and her "good" dishes in those cabinets. Tucked between the refrigerator and the washer was Mom's sewing machine. A Singer Dad got her to replace the treadle machine she had in the basement.

Although in later years Mom had a dedicated "sewing room," in our childhood home Mom would set up her sewing machine on the kitchen table. It was there she taught my sisters and I (and countless 4H-ers) to sew. It was there I carved, "I hate sewing" into the base of her Singer after sewing and ripping apart the same seam over and over again. It was there she made my winter coat when I was in fourth grade. It was there she sewed my sister's wedding dress, our prom dresses, countless school outfis, an endless amount of Tammy Doll clothes and anything else we needed.

I have a Singer sewing machine as well. It was a gift from our children this past Mother's Day.  But I don't have the patience to set up and take down a sewing machine every time I get a creative urge. So my Singer is set up in one of our upstairs bedrooms. I am not certain our children will ever fully appreciate how much I enjoy sewing on that machine. And I certainly have put it to good use. This past Christmas I made totes for our grandchildren (all 16 of them) and filled the totes with art supplies. 

Mom would have liked that.