Finding Direction: The Wind Vane Chronicles

. . . that their mom is the best in the whole wide world.  Including me.  Plus, my mom reads my blog so what else do you expect me to say here today on her nearly Christmas birthday.

Oh yeah – she’s 85 today.  That sounds like an amazing number of years to me to be alive and well and semi-well adjusted (just kidding, Mom) in this amazing world of ours compared the world she was born into in December 1921.

Just think – when my mom was born they had not yet discovered insulin.  If I had been my mom instead of me, I most probably would have died at a very young age of diabetes.  No doubt. 

You know something else interesting.  Well there’s lots of things I find very interesting about her life, but here’s one I just thought of for the first time about a year ago.  She was a Christmas baby!!  How neat, I thought.  And how miraculous that all seems to me now in thinking of the advances in childbirthing and all.

I mean – she was born at home in a small town in Oklahoma and I don’t even know if a doctor was present.  In fact, my granddad’s first young wife and baby had both died in childbirth.  So, I’m sure he was most apprehensive about my mom’s impending birth, even though they already had a little two year old boy, Oliver.

When my mom was growing up, they had no bathrooms and no electricity in their home until she was in college.  By that time (when she was still very little, actually), they had moved from a sheep ranch out in New Mexico in the desert to the south plains of the panhandle of Texas to Abernathy.  

Later that area was all irrigated farming from big engines pulling the water up deep from the aquifers beneath the land, but I’m not sure it was when she was small.  Her dad used mules to pull the plows to grow the cotton and milo grain.

Her grandmother, my great-grandmother, later lived with them and they took in my grandma’s crippled sister and her two youngin’s, too, who lived in a separate little house.  So, for her entire life that she remembers, my mom slept with someone else in the bed until my dad died 10 years ago.  First her grandma, then college roommates and then my dad for 53 years.  That was one of her big adjustments to widowhood to be by herself for the first time in her life when she was 74 going on 75.

She and my uncle (as well as my dad, whose family lived in Abernathy by then) did well in school and all graduated from high school at 16.  All three of them (along with my dad’s two brothers) and a lot of their friends went to Texas Technological College, which is now Texas Tech University in Lubbock, of course.  At some point they dropped the "Technological" because no one could say it.  They all graduated from college at 20, which is really young, isn’t it. 

She and my dad were married a year or so later and I was born when she was 23.  The first of four children she would have, losing one when he was 8 to brain cancer (my little brother).

 I could (and probably should) write a book about my mom’s life.  I realize more as each day passes what a loss to my world it is going to be when she’s gone.   She’s well read, has a massive library, is a terrific cook and great organizer.

She has a degree in Business Administration (even her grandmother earned a college degree in 1877 from the University of Kansas and her mom from Friends University in 1910), and is a great organizer.  She runs her business (her rented out farm) better than I’ll ever run our lives.

She’s exactly the kind of mom I’d love to be but never will, but she even makes me feel good about that.  She tells me,"you’re more high and low and really feeling all the intensity of life, while I on the other hand, am just on this even level plane all the time missing out."  That is true, but I still try to emulate all the best that she is.

She’s witty and funny as all get out and supportive and – well – just the world’s best mom, you know?!  Y’all know.  Y’all have moms, or had moms, just like her, hopefully. 

So, Happy Birthday today, Mom, when you read this.  And hey Baby – have a Merry Christmas,too.  You see, Mom, I was too busy writing blog posts to send you a Christmas card, but I know you’re not the sentimental type anyway so I’ll just call you later and tell you.

For the rest of you  – Cheers & Blessings to you today, ya hear!  Dee

P. S.  As soon as we get past Christmas & New Year’s here, friends, we’ll jump into the Second Annual Finding Direction Winter Desktop Photo Contest, so all yall be getting your cameras out and looking for winter water (of any form) pictures, you hear?!  The winter fun is about to begin in just a couple of weeks, once the blahs have set in for all of us.