My mom would have been 82 next week.
This is the kind of thing I’ve been thinking about, especially over the last few days. I sit down to write a blog post and get nowhere because my brain is like one of those Jiffy Pops at mass capacity – pop! pop! pop! pop pop pop pop pop pop pop POP!!
What is, is. So here we go.
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My mom had beautiful eyes. All the rest of us have brown eyes so she was that kid doin’ her own thing in our family.
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She loved the color blue. We live in North Carolina so everyone here is all Duke Blue is the only blue! and You’re crazy! Carolina Blue all the way! but mom loved something in between. More of a cornflower blue really. It brought out her eyes.
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Mom taught me to cross stitch. I can still picture her on the loveseat, afghan over her lap, cat by her side as she worked on her piece.
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She l-o-v-e-d books. We’d go to the library and leave with arms full during the summer. I remember watching her stand in the aisle pulling book after book off the shelf, reading the blurb and deciding if it was worth taking. She chose carefully because we reached our checkout limit every time.
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In her last years the Parkinson’s made it impossible to read well. She kept losing focus and couldn’t retain information, but she never lost her love of reading itself. We started bringing her books on CD from the library instead, and finding mom wearing her headphones became as second nature as those stacks of library books.
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All my life I knew mom as a blond. She might have been brunette at one time but blond is so firmly etched in my memory that it’s all I can see. Strange to think she could have looked entirely different as a teenager.
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We always had Siamese cats. I don’t know why we didn’t get a dog; I don’t actually remember ever asking for one. We just had cats. And mom adored our cat. So much so that she was willing to fend off angry birds to rescue him when he got stranded in the backyard.
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Mom loved cardinals. Especially the red ones.
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She used to make Welsh Cookies. Oh my gosh, I could eat those for days, they were so good. (Though I’ve been told recently you really had to be raised on them to like them, otherwise they taste like chalky flour. As if. But maybe I should note that ours were classic recipe from the old country and didn’t have any nonsense like this sugar sprinkled on them – sacrilege!) Right up until the end Bee would make a big batch at Christmas and set apart one whole sleeve for mom. She positively glowed when she spotted them.
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I don’t remember a lot about our day to day life; I just remember mom somehow made it work. Two different soccer practices and a band competition? Beats me how but she got us all to our spots and nobody got left behind at the end of the day. Guess we’re all Supermom when we need to be.
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“Carole with an E.” I can’t begin to count how many times I heard my mom say that. To this day I’m caught off guard by women with the name Carol(e) and without fail note if they, too, use an E.
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So I have an odd little medley of mom pics loaded into WordPress. Here they are, with no particular rhyme or reason.
Ohhh. Your mother was a beautiful woman and it lives on with you and yours. She always seems like a good balance of fun and practicality, which I also see in you. Sometimes these random things generate the need for pause, for remembrance. This was a lovely post capture. I’ll share one you evoked from me.
My father had Siamese cats, too. Three in a row. Then he got Khaki, who was an orange tiger, and my father complained he didn’t talk enough, wasn’t lovey enough, said he thought he may as well have gotten another pug, lol!
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“didn’t talk enough” – indeed! I remember our cat’s HUN-GAAA cry echoing through the house. My mom once said they sound like a baby crying. It didn’t make sense to me back then but once we raised some babies of our own it definitely rang true. For some reason that name Khaki is really tickling me!
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🙂 Yep, they’re noisy!
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Thank you for sharing these mom memories and photos. I think she’s smiling right now. 🙂
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Thanks, JoAnna. Writing this definitely helped me smile. She’s still helping, even after she’s gone. 💛
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🙂 ❤
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I’m glad you have such good memories. That keeps her spirit alive.
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Thanks, Dan. She was a special lady.
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Beautiful lady, beautiful memories. Thanks for sharing your Mom. ❤
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Thank you. 💛
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It’s wonderful that you have all these memories of your mother. Not everyone has good memories of their mom.
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That’s so very true, Cadie. Thanks for reading today. 💛
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Mom was a grand lady.
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Indeed. Thanks, Jim. 💛
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A lovely tribute to your mother. I like your memories of her, simply written. I’m intrigued with the Welsh Cookie recipe. My mother was Welsh with a sweet tooth, but I never had these cookies. 🤔
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Thank you. I linked the recipe I found online but it’s been so long since I made them I’m not sure how close it is. Ours were bready. The spices and currants made them, well, distinct. 😊
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My grandmother was part Welsh but she moved to Manchester so it was always eccles cakes…
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Beautiful memories of of beautiful soul
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Thank you. 🙏🏼
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i love these memories of your mom
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Thank you. 💛
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