My Mother

 

Have you ever read the book, Strawberry Girl? It was written by the author Lois Lenski, who wrote books about children from different regions of the country. I asked my children for a copy of it for a Christmas present this year. When they started looking, the looked for an original copy, but it was out of reach, and so they gave me a paperback edition, which happens to be a sixtieth anniversary edition. I just began reading it last night. I'm sure that I read it as a girl.

The setting is Florida. The characters are families who are making a living, or trying to, off the sandy soil. I remember my mother speaking of having to pick strawberries as a girl to help the family make a living. In her later years, she would still go to the fields to pick them after the farmers opened them up to the public. One day she said how much she disliked the task...it isn't easy, you know, with the strawberries growing on the low plants.

My mother was raised in north Florida. She told me that her father's family came from South Carolina, as did the characters in this book. Mother was the second of six children. At one time in her life, she told me that her daddy worked in a logging camp in Scanlon, and they actually lived in a box car. She never did describe to me how it was, and I have a hard time imagining it. Was it literally a box, with no windows? Was it somehow made to be livable? It was when she was twelve that she said she contracted malaria. I can only imagine how hard that might have been.

I remember her teling me how her mother washed the kids' hair with kerosene to get rid of the lice that they had gotten from those "dirty children" who lived not too far away.

I don't know when they moved to town, but Mother graduated from high school in 1930 from the high school in Starke. Some of you know Starke as that town on 301 that you have to drive through when you're going from I-10 to I-75. Although she was next to the oldest of her siblings, she was the only one to graduate from high school.

At some point, she moved from Starke to Lacoochee to live with her older sister, and that is where she met my daddy, who lived in Trilby. He worked at the Cummer Cypress Lumber Mill. They met and married in 1933, right during the depression. Mother didn't have wedding rings until she had been married ten years. In one of my first posts, I shared how they left Lacoochee and moved to Bradenton.

Mother was a very hard worker. She worked in a drug store in Bradenton from 1947 to 1964 when my father died from a heart attack. Montgomery Ward opened a big, new store, and she managed their coffee shop for a while.

She was 50 when my daddy died. I had graduated from college and had gone to Cincinnati to work, and I did not realize what a hard time my mother was having. Both of her parents died and my father died all within a thirteen month period. She continued at her work in order to keep going, but as I said, I didn't know just how hard it was for her.

She was always there for me, whenever I needed anything. I guess that's what mothers are for, isn't it. When Don and I built our house, she gave us money for all the window treatments. When Sarah was born, she took care of her for her first two years of life. We paid her Social Security so that we could claim the child care on our income tax, and when she had finished taking care of her, she gave us the money back that we had given to her.

She's been gone for twelve years. She had a hard life, but a good life, and she never complained... not that I remember anyway. Time has a way of erasing anything unpleasant, doesn't it, and that's a good thing.


"Look in those eyes. Listen to tht dear voice. Notice the feeling of even a single touch that is bestowed upon you by that gentle hand! Make much of it while yet you have that most precious of all gifts. Read the unfathomable love of those eyes, the anxiety of that tone and look, however slight is your pain. In after life you may have friends, fonds, dears, but never you will have again the inexpressible love and gentleness lavished upon you which mone but a mother bestows." - Macaulay