Here’s a picture of Mom and her sisters, and their mom, Martha Anderson. [Grandma is front and center. From left to right: Shirley, Arlene, Rosalie, Barbara, Mom.] This photo was taken at the Hotel Utah in the early 70’s, where these lasses would occasionally get together for a mother-daughters sleepover for a night or two—away from the hubbies and wild kids, and away from having to cook and clean. I can only imagine the cackle-fest which ensued when they took over the hotel.
You can see from the photo that by that time, Grandma had already lost her right eye. At first, she wore a glass eye in public. She wasn’t vain. She simply did not want to scare children. However, the prosthesis bothered her bigly, so she finally quit wearing it completely. (But not before she dropped it in my car once while I was driving her to the Provo temple, and it rolled around on the floor mats as I drove, cuz we were running late and Grandma wouldn’t let me stop the car until we got to the temple. Oooo, that’s a story I need to write about for y’all. ) Grandma preferred to cover the right lens of her glasses so no one could see her eyeless eye. It wept constantly.
The second photo shows a perfect example of Mom’s cleverness. This is a pic of the cake Mom commissioned Marcia Meacham to create for Grandma’s 90th Birthday party at the old Delta care center. The cake captures Grandma’s quiltiness. And I so like the tiny ears of corn dotting some of the “quilt” squares. But the best cake detail is the covered right lens on Grandma’s glasses. Grandma—and the rest of the partygoers—got a true kick out of it.
When I lived in the Washington, D.C.-area, I wanted Dad to come see the sights. Knowing my parents as I do, I knew they didn’t like to both be away from their bee ranch at the same time, so Dad needed a travel pal to fly across the country with him. My sister, BT, to the rescue! She’s adventurous. Mercedes, as I usually refer to her, has never seen a tombstone, monument, or museum she didn’t have to check out. Add Dad to the equation and she was all in for the trip. Here are pix I snapped of them at the Lincoln Memorial and at Harpers’ Ferry, W VA. (Yes, it is on this trip when people who saw Dad walking in D. C. honked their horns and/or asked for his “Sean Connery” autograph.)
Today, TIE O’ THE DAY wishes the merriest of birthdays to BT, my first-born sibling! BT is yet another “porch worthy” icon in my life. This morning I wrote about imagining Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Mom lighting up my old Delta porch with scintillating conversation, and I want y’all to know that the “porch worthy” BT, my Mercedes, would be sitting right there—laughing with us all, way too loudly for the neighborhood to handle without checking on us to make sure we old ladies were not in any danger of a medical emergency.
BT and I are the oldest and youngest of the family, 15 years apart in age—near-matching bookends to our siblings. We look alike, especially in our school pictures. We share a love of not just reading books, but of studying them. It’s like neither one of us ever left school. I don’t know what we’re studying for, but I can guarantee that if you give either of us a pop quiz on just about anything relating to history, social sciences, and the humanities, we would probably both pass—especially if we did the quiz together. We are both interested in almost any topic.
BT and I are on similar wavelengths in terms of public policy and the importance of including the word “responsibilities” whenever we talk about the word “rights.” We share a whole-hearted belief in Mosiah 2:17, about the importance of serving our fellow beings. And we do not tolerate bullying, in any forum. To us, meanness has no place in any context where human beings gather to learn, work, or worship. We stand against the whole of that sort of unnecessary contention, even when it sometimes feels as if we two are standing alone.
We have similar minor pet peeves. We most certainly get agitated when people who should know better don’t spell and use words correctly and appropriately. In fact, we are both slightly—but proudly—snotty about clear language usage. BT and I would both be embarrassed to be caught somewhere with our grammar down around our ankles, so to speak.
I could go on. I could give you a million ways we mirror each other, and I could give you a million ways we don’t. Suffice it to say that I find my Mercedes to be interestingly different from me. I hope I am the same to her. I would hate to be BORINGLY different from her.
Love and peace to you on your birthday, my Sister Who Lets Me Name Her in my tblog.
I think Dad’s fave photography subject was Mom. I can’t tell for sure if she’s wearing a wedding ring or not in these pix, but I feel confident saying Dad took these in either ’47 or ’48—before they were married. I’m just guessing at where they were at the time, but it looks like these might have been taken somewhere near Baker, Nevada/Lehman Caves—once again, probably on a day trip to work in one of Dad’s bee yards there. I have a suspicion that no matter the place or date these photographs were taken Mom and Dad had a grand time together. I have titled this triptych o’ snapshots “Mom and the 3 G’s:” Mom and a Gate; Mom and a Gun; and Mom and Fake Gender Confusion.
‘Tis I, doing one of my many impersonations of Mom. I call this particular impression “Mom And Her Fresh CHRONICLE.” Mom and her weekly MILLARD COUNTY CHRONICLE PROGRESS, a.k.a. THE CHRONICLE, are inseparable when she gets her mitts on a new issue.
Mom has never personally subscribed to Delta’s weekly paper, because she is too impatient. She has to read it hot off the press—whole hours before it could possibly show up in her mailbox. Getting a copy in her mail on Wednesday is unacceptable to her. She gets her copy the minute they hit the local stores on Tuesday afternoons. When Mom moved in with my brother in St. George after she broke her hip, my Sister Who Wishes To Remain Nameless bought Mom a CHRONICLE subscription to be sent to her there. Mom was forced to read her beloved hometown newspaper out of the mailbox on Wednesday’s or Thursday’s, depending on when it showed up in my brother’s mail. I am convinced Mom decided to move to MCR in Delta, just so she could somehow get her CHRONICLE on Tuesday afternoons again. Since Mom moved into MCR almost two years ago, my Sister Who Wishes To Remain Nameless and her husband have faithfully delivered Mom her CHRONICLE every Tuesday, the minute a copy is available for purchase.
Jump back to 2017, before I sold my Delta place (a.k.a. Momo and Popo’s house), and before Mom broke her hip. Here’s what Mom’s Tuesday schedule looked like:
8:30 AM. Mom saunters over to my living room, where she sits in a puffy chair and asks, “Should we see if Pegetha wants to go for a drink today?” I don’t know why she ever asked. Of course, Peggy (Mom’s best friend) wanted to get a drink. Of course, Mom and Peggy wanted to be driven all over the county to see what’s what and who’s who. And of course, Mom would call Peggy to see for sure that she wanted to go with us.
9AM. Mom and I get in her car and I drive us to Peggy’s house. I hit the horn.
9:01 AM. Peggy gets in the passenger side of the car.
9:02 AM. I order 2 Pepsi’s and a Diet Coke from the Cardwell’s drive-up window.
9:02:45 AM. A bickering ensues about whose turn it is to pay for the drinks. We also chat with the gals working at Cardwell’s, cuz we haven’t seen them since…..yesterday at 9:02:45 AM. The car behind us at the drive-up wishes we’d pull away, but the driver waves at us cheerfully anyway. The driver knows who we are because we are sitting in either the Helenmobile or the Pegethamobile. Mom and Peggy each have their own vanity plates, and they are famous and beloved women of Delta. Because of their fame, we can get away with a lot of things others can’t. I’m just the chauffeur.
9:07 AM. I drive the two Old Girls across the valley, while we drink and once again solve the problems of the world—while catching up on whatever it is we need to catch up on since yesterday.
11:00 AM. We drop off Peggy at her place, where Mom reminds her it’s CHRONICLE day, and Peggy says to Mom, “Ours won’t be here until the mail tomorrow.” Same sentences, every Tuesday.
11:01 AM. I park us in front of Mom’s house, as close as I can get her to her front door, where she asks if I’ll drive uptown to buy her a CHRONICLE as soon as it’s out—as if I don’t already know it’s my job.
From 11:02-whenever THE CHRONICLE is available. Mom searches for a pair of reading glasses with both lenses. This is a task which usually takes Mom a bigly chunk of time.
CHRONICLE o’ clock PM. I drive to fetch a copy of THE CHRONICLE from Jubilee because it’s the closest place to get it.
30 seconds later. I’m back to hand off the paper to Helen Sr., knowing she will be happily hunkered down and glued to it for the rest of the day. Finally, I can get a nap in.
8:00 PM. Mom comes over to my house to go to sleep early on my couch, because it’s been another busy CHRONICLE day for Mom.
I think this is Thanksgiving dinner for our family at the Palomar in the early 2000’s. My Grandma Wright was the unofficial guest of honor. Mom was head cook.
Not everyone can live next door to their mother-in-law without bigly problems. We lived next door to my dad’s parents, and the only issue I can recall is that Mom felt a bit embarrassed if dad’s mom—who we called Momo—came to our door and the living room looked like a family was living in it. But that was on Mom. I don’t think Momo ever gave Mom a snooty judgement about her lived-in living room. In fact, Mom has told many a story of going out to get the clothes off our clothesline out back, and finding socks that had been hung to dry with holes in them had miraculously been darned. Momo strikes again. Mom took no offense. She considered it as the help it was, and not as a condemnation of her ability to take care of her own family.
Recipes got traded between Mom and Momo. They watched each other’s homes and cars, and collected each other’s mail, if one or the other was out of town. They didn’t belong to the same clubs, but they liked hearing about each others activities. They did Relief Society stuff together. They were in the same ward, of course. They really couldn’t get rid of each other, nor did they seem to want to.
As my grandparents got older and more bound to the inside of their house, I saw them less. At dinner, every evening without fail, Mom or Dad would ask, “Has anyone checked on the folks today?”—meaning Momo and Popo. If somebody hadn’t done it yet, Mom would come up with a message or a goodie to send over with me to their place, so I could verify Momo and Popo were alive and kicking. It was an important lesson: Love your neighbor. Yet again, kindness rules.
Boundaries are good. Good fences make good neighbors. But looking out for your Momo and Popo is always proper. Have you loved your neighbor today?
I don’t know anything about where and when Dad snapped this photo of Mom and his car. I have absolutely no story to tell about it, or really anything to yammer on about beyond saying Mom is far from 90 in the photo. I can, however, tell you that I have teased Mom many times about how I think she only married Dad because he had a car, and bees, and indoor plumbing. Mom gets a kick out of my musings about her chasing Dad for those three reasons. I am certain the fact that they were crazy for each other had nothing at all to do with them getting married.
Half of A Bow Tie o’ the Day is better than none at all.
Hey, earlier this week, I posted this pic in a set of pix about Mom and Skitter, but it’s the perfect photo for what I’m writing about this morning, which is Mom and Suzanne. They have been chums from the beginning. I think they trade secrets about me, and they conspire against me—if only to keep me on the straight and narrow. I am not necessary to their conversations. They talk sewing and cooking and house decor. Blah, blah, blah. After one of Suzanne’s surgeries, I took her to Mom’s and dropped her off for a week of recovery, while I drove back up to Ogden with Rowan so he wouldn’t have to miss any school. Mom pampered Suzanne with lots of quiet and plenty of tasty food, as we knew she would. I wasn’t worried about either of them. When I picked up Suzanne at the end of the week, she was nearly healed.
One of the first times Suzanne and Mom met was in 1985. We were all in Mom’s kitchen, and Mom was concocting cookies—chocolate chip, I think. (No surprise there.) The three of us gabbed and guffawed about who-knows-what. Mom plopped the cookie dough on the baking sheet and put it in the oven. I think she even sat down with us for three or four minutes. (Mom rarely sat down in her kitchen: She ruled it and hovered around guests from a standing position, always at the ready to start cooking something else, or wash a dish.) So there we were—just the three of us chatting away in Mom’s kitchen kingdom, when Mom jumped up and screamed, “I forgot to finish putting all the flour in the cookie dough!”
She did not skip a beat. She flew to the oven, retrieved the cookie sheet, and scraped the partially baked cookies back into the mixing bowl. She folded-in the rest of the flour, then plopped the cookie dough back on the sheet, and stuck it back in the oven—hoping the treats might work out. OMGolly, if I—or anybody else—had tried to correct the same mistake the way Mom did, my cookies would have come out barely worthy of going into the trash. But Mom’s “ruined” cookies were sooooooooo yummerific. It was an impressive feat to see. I think it was right at that moment when Suzanne decided she better keep me, if only to be around Mom performing her miracles.
In this photo, we see Mom donning some work duds to help Dad in one of his bee yards. From what I can guesstimate, this was probably taken in 1948 or ’49—either right before, or soon after, they were married. In fact, it would not surprise me if this was where they spent their honeymoon—visiting Dad’s bee yards, from Delta to California and back again. Look at Mom’s expression! I think it’s so cute that she looks undeniably giddy at the prospect of venturing into a buzzing bee yard with Dad. Now that’s what I call love.
In the fairytale truth of Mom and Dad’s love story, I’m sure it was not one of Cupid’s arrows that struck them. It’s more probable that a stinger from one of Dad’s bees was what pierced their young hearts to make them fall into eternal, old love.
BTW Here’s where I pester you again: Send Mom a “90th Birthday” card/note/ice cream cone, etc. before the 26th @ Helen A. Wright, Millard Care and Rehab, Room #104, 150 White Sage Ave., Delta, UT 84624. Thanks to y’all for always watching out for Mom—especially during that last year before she agreed to peacefully hand over her car keys to us. 😎😉
Mom has always humored my whims. She’d gladly wear a Bow Tie o’ the Day for me any time I ask. And she did. Many times. And I’m sure she will again. Many times. This photo was taken at her home on August 26, 2017.
After Dad died, whenever I was in Delta, Mom made two or three daily trips across the alley to my Delta house—carrying her little glass of Pepsi. If weather permitted, we hung out on the front porch. In inclement weather, she sat in my living room—where we chatted and laughed and solved the problems of the world. Then Mom would be off to her house again to cook, or read The Chronicle or The Tribune for the umpteenth time, or otherwise putter around her full, but empty, rooms.
Mid-evening, Mom would show up at my place again to spend the night. She never slept in her house alone after Dad was gone. She wasn’t afraid of being alone at night. It just made her miss him too much. I always offered her a bed, but she liked sleeping on our couch, where she could hear the noises of our house: the tv, dishes being done, the washer, dogs being let out to potty, etc. She would wake early and walk the 40 feet back to her house, where she climbed into a bed that wasn’t hers and Dad’s, in a bedroom that hadn’t been theirs. She would sleep a few more hours, and our routine would begin again.
Such a simple sight to see: Mom, in her outfit of mixed pj’s and coats, holding a tiny glass of Pepsi, strolling up the sidewalk—just to sit with me, so we could share good gossip and cure the ills of the world. Memories can be quick snapshots in your head. One of my deepest felt “snapshots” is simply Mom walking slowly to my front door, glass in hand.
