Early May is a "perfect storm" of remembrance days for my family. My mother's birthday was May 3; she died near midnight between May 7 and 8; Mother's Day is always in here somewhere.
Because I live where she grew up, in a place she loved, I think about her often even though she died nine years ago. I'm fortunate because to me, as time passes, she is becoming all different ages. She's more than the failing woman she became at the end of her life, the strict disciplinarian from my childhood, or the interesting woman I knew in between. She's a baby, a confident child. A young scholar. A young wife.
At the family home in town.
Posing at the big flat rock just around the corner from our family
camp, which is "just over there" from where I now sit.
Receiving her Ph.D. in mathematics from Radcliffe (really Harvard) in 1941.
Young marrieds. You can't see this, but my grandmother wrote"And so, they lived happily ever after"
next to this picture.
And so they did, pretty much.
At the Crapture, I became custodian of a lot of family papers. I have grand plans for these papers. Someday. However, at the moment, I tend to lose time reading around in a five-year diary my grandmother kept from 1934 through 1938. It's fascinating to me in no small part because I see my mother's relationship with her own mother.In 1938, my mother was in Boston at graduate school, away from her own mother for the first time. Money was scarce and travel difficult, but my grandparents managed to bring my mother home to Port Arthur for Christmas that year.
On December 23, 1938, my grandmother wrote "Friday--Jeanne arrived at home--beautiful and beloved."
It all makes me think of that Kodak commercial from the 1960s. This one:
Someday perhaps I'll have the technical chops to replace the images with scenes from my mother's life. I'll add it to my Grand Plan list. For now, I just enjoy being in touch with all the ways in which my mother was beautiful and beloved.
