Memories of Mom

We said Goodbye to my mom yesterday and some of these memories we’re shared at her celebration of life. I decided today would be a good day to share with you what was written in full

Memories of Mom

I went looking for quotes that best described my mom and I found these three from Winnie the Pooh and Eeyore

“How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard” -Winnie the Pooh

“After all, one can’t complain. I have my friends.”- Eeyore

“Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.” – Winnie the Pooh

When I sat down to write this, I really had no idea what I was going to say about my mom.  I mean I could tell you that her favorite color was red, her favorite flower was the red rose, she loved cardinals, we found out later in her life that she really liked cows too. Desserts needed to be ooey gooey to be good; on the flip side bread had to have as many grains as possible in it for her to like it. She loved old time gospel music, Danny O’Donnell and Lawrence Welk. In fact, for a while that was a Saturday night trifecta. She hated sports, but loved Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. Family was everything to her.  Now you know the basics about her.

But let me tell you about the person you really didn’t know. My mom was the oldest of two children but considered herself the middle child of three. She was raised with her cousin Wayne and brother Jim. She was born in the Sauk Centere and grew up in Eagle Bend and graduated from Eagle Bend high school. Went to teachers training in Staples and finished her education degree at St. Cloud State University. When she was in the fourth grade she was playing with her friends and she fell off of a wood pile and broke her leg. Her teacher would come to the house and go over homework with her until she could return to school. What will amaze you about this story is that she kept in contact with that teacher until that teacher passed away.

That is who she was, she kept in touch with her friends. If she understood Facebook, she would have loved it.

I once asked her if she always wanted to be a teacher and she replied “what else would I have been.”  She loved teaching kids but really loved when something finally clicked for a kid, she was teaching whether it was math or spelling or later on the basics at Montessori.

My mom volunteered here at Immanuel, she was the Sunday school supervisor for many years, in the early years, we would come early, walk across to the parish house, , because that is where the Sunday school was held for many years.  To turn on the heat and make sure that there was coffee for the Sunday school teachers. In the 70’s and early 80’s we attended the Mother/ daughter brunch every year and every year she would win for having the most pictures of her kids in her purse… Mind you it was 1979 and she still had Gordy’s baby picture in there from 1964.  In the early 80’s through the mid 80’s every holy week she would go into production of lamb shaped cakes for the Sadder dinner that the church held.  Frosting and jelly beans had to be just right to look like fur and eyes and noses.  She started the library, was active in many of the women’s circles, and in later years, the quilting group.

My mom made sure that we had the chance to experience as many things as we wanted to. Sandy and I were active in Campfire and she was Sandy’s Campfire leader. Cookouts, overnights, day camp, overnight camp and candy sales… at times in the fall of the year our dinning room floor look like we had a serious sugar addiction! When her grandchildren came along that thought process continued with trips to the science museum, both the MN zoo and the Como zoo, and children’s theatre productions. When my mom learned that Josh really didn’t like hugs, she made sure she asked for one every time she saw him.

We grew up in an era that we played outside and played with the neighbor kids, with games of Kick the can, touch football, capture the flag and so many other games, but my mom had a unique way to call us home for dinner or it was getting to late. We had an old bell on the front of our house, you know the kind that like you would find on a ranch to call the ranch hands in, yep, we had one and when that bell rang, we all knew it was time to go home.

One summer night it was really hot, and I woke up to a lot of noise outside my bedroom window. I got up to realize that my parents’ friends had “broken in” the backyard to go swimming. Funny never worried about our friends breaking in to go swimming but theirs? Yep. My mom didn’t swim, in fact she had a fear of the water after falling through a frozen pond when she was young and never learning how to swim but she made sure that we knew how to swim and she would get in the pool a couple times a summer with us. My mom also never learned to ride a bike, but my dad had a tandem bike for them, but if you looked closely on family bike rides, her feet were on the pedals but that was about it. But she was making sure she participated in those family bike rides.

She loved going to plays and musicals, there was a time in her life that I don’t think she missed a performance out at the Chanhassen Dinner Theatre.  We saw all of the “Church Basement Ladies” series and I remember her taking me and our neighbor kid to see “A Christmas Story” and she was walking out and said to the neighbor kid’s mom “well that was not what I was expecting”.

 Her family was everything to her. Whether it was your birthday acknowledged by a card or that special gift that she would search hours for and delivered by UPS – Yep, she was the original Amazon. She made sure that she was at all the graduations and wedding of her nieces and nephews and later her great nieces.  If there was a birthday party or anniversary party happening for one of her cousins, she would try her hardest to be there.

When her brother Jim lived just outside of Boston, she took all three of us kids in 1976 and we celebrated the centennial of our country by learning about our country and by having a great time seeing the sights of Massachusetts. I am not exactly sure how many days we were there, but we packed a lot of site seeing into those days. One of my favorite memories of that trip is all six of kids packed into the back seat of my uncle’s car and singing camp songs as we went from one spot to the next. The best part is she was the one encouraging going what else do you all know. Now imagine 6 kids singing Father Abraham with all the gestures in the back seat of a car.

At different points in time, we all traveled with her and dad to Florida for Race Week. We would go to Disney World where she would ride some rides with us. But mostly just hang out. On one trip she made sure that I got to an alligator farm. I was in heaven. Magnificent creatures of all sizes, I got to hold a baby alligator and I remember the people we were traveling with thought I was crazy. But she understood, after all it was her that gave me my first stuffed alligator and later encouraged a research project on them.

In the later years my mom and dad took to the road in their 1940 or 1946 Cadillac to places like Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Texas, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Alaska, Canada. She loved to travel in these cars and loved seeing the United States this way. They traveled around 60,000 miles in these cars and about 40,000 miles in modern cars.

Mom took a couple of trips without my dad too, on one trip, she and I went to Hawaii and explored Oahu.  Her favorite spot was the market place that we would go to at night, she loved it because it had fun little unique stores that market had to offer, she also liked to go “pearl diving”. My mom also went with her longtime friend Joy Nelson, on a cruise to the Panama Canal, this was the chance of a lifetime and we all told her to go. This was not the first time she and Joy and traveled together, prior to getting married mom traveled with Joy out to Holden Village for two weeks.

My mom hated sports but, on the trips, to race week she would go one day during the week with my dad and watch the race with him. In fact, she had countless stories of sitting at raceway park in Shakopee and watching Dad and his friends race early in their relationship and marriage. And would continue that tradition watching her son, Gordy, pit crew for his friends and later her grandson Josh drive at raceway.

When we came along there were dance recitals for Sandy and I, ice skating lessons, gymnastics, swimming lessons, football practices, basketball practice and games, softball and baseball practice and games. If you think that the term soccer mom was invented in the late 90’s you are wrong. They were just moms with station wagons prior too that.  My mom would drive 2 hours to watch Sandy play rugby when she was in college. She would stand on the sidelines and watch the match; even though she understood nothing about the game. Sandy was playing and that was all that mattered to her. She would stand on the sidelines in the rain of Gordy’s football games during his sophomore season and never missed a Friday night his junior and senior year.  She watched every basketball game Sandy played in high school. She attended every hot swimming meet I had.

Later in life it became a joke between her and I that it was time for the Vikings game or a Twins game and she would protest but watch the game with me. When she worked for Montessori one year, she had a Minnesota Viking player by the name of Darren Nelson’s child in her classroom.  She made mention to him that I was a Vikings fan away at college but that he was my favorite player and that she would like to surprise me for my birthday with his autograph. Darren told her I will do you one better, and when he returned the next day, he had the whole team’s autographs on official Vikings stationary for me. Yes, I still I have that. A few years later a guy by the name of Cris Carter and his kids showed up in her classroom. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Carter on accident as I showed up at her work to drop off something for her and he was there picking up his kids and I might have developed a slight stutter trying to talk to him. Later that week I ended up with a signed Cris Carter jersey.  She hated sports but she understood our love for them and cheered us on whenever she could.

My mom never missed a band or a choir concert. Mom would bring us every week to music lessons in Hopkins until we were able to drive ourselves. She would haul us to early morning choir rehearsal or pick us up after school from late practice.  They would travel to Sioux Falls at least once during the year for the vespers concert and for my final senior band concert. When I joined the Hopkins WestWind community band, I know she never missed a concert in fact her last concert she watched on YouTube and told me when I got out to the house afterwards that it needed more real Christmas music, but she liked the Hanukkah piece.

Saturdays were her day. She would either have breakfast with her Montessori teacher friends or lunch with me or someone else and then go shopping. She didn’t always buy stuff, but I liked to call them intel missions. She would look and see if she could find the perfect gift for someone. She loved stores like the General Store or craft shows to find that unique gift for someone.  My mom also had a thing for Dishes, back in the day if we went into Dayton’s we knew were going to the dishes area to look around and maybe come home with a bowl or a platter for the upcoming holiday.  This was also in the era that the grocery store’s would “give away” dishes if you bought so much in groceries.  All three of us had our own first set of dishes by the age of 10 by the age of 16 I think I had 3 sets of everyday dishes along with “some China pieces to start me out”. 

My mom loved to celebrate the holidays and her table was always open for whoever needed a place to celebrate the holidays whether it friends of ours from school or family friends with no family in the area, all were welcome at her table. I think Christmas was her favorite holiday; As kids, we would go as a family to the tree farm and wander through the trees until we found the perfect tree for us. One of the musts for the tree is that it had to be taller than mom.  Once we were grown, they went to an artificial tree but it was still the best tree every year. My mom was creative and loved to make crafts as I said once before there was not a legg’s egg in the 70’s that was safe from her crafting.

 She was also an original foodie. Before the food network, door dash and even her beloved food magazine’s. She was always looking for new recipes to try and would love buying church cookbooks, because as she said “they always have the best recipes.”  My mom canned from the early 60’s to the mid 80’s when she finally decided that not everything needed to be canned. But she would can tomatoes, cucumbers, fruit, make jelly, if it grew in the ground or on a tree, she could can it. She loved food magazines and looking at recipes. As kids we, didn’t realize it, but later in life we all learned to thank dad that we were not subjected to liver or lutefisk. But if it was an odd food, you can bet my mom loved it.  One night recently she was looking at a food magazine and I was making lasagna for dinner and I asked her if she wanted lasagna for dinner and she said no this and pointed to an everything bagel sandwich and I said I would gladly make that for you if you would eat it and if I had everything to make it so how about lasagna and again, she said no this. We compromised she had soup.

Towards the end of her life, my mom didn’t have a lot to say most days but she was still interested in everything that was going on in our lives. She would ask about work and on a really good day she would ask about the dogs and the cat. She would always look at the newest pictures of “my girls”.  She and I had a routine that last year. I would walk in and say “hi sunshine” and I would wait for a hi back if no hi I always got a small wave. When I would leave, the routine was to tell her to “behave and be good” and she would say “why that’s no fun.”  And then I would tell her I loved her and she would say “love you too.”

Until next time,

Juli