days in the life of a
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Mama
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November 8, 2009
BEFORE SHE WAS MAMA
Before she was Mama, she was a sweet, innocent teenage girl, growing up in a working-class family in coastal North Carolina.
She was smart and shy and beautiful!
She had hopes and dreams for a wonderful future, with no clue she would end up living her life in far-off Indiana. Indiana may as well have been a foreign country, as far as she was concerned.
How could she have known that three short years after this carefree day on the beach she would have fallen head-over-heels in love with a Marine, be planning her wedding, and preparing to move 850 miles away from her family and the only life she'd ever known?
She was tall, willowy, and gorgeous! As many people have told me, she was known as "the purdiest girl in Jones County."
And smart too! She would have been valedictorian of her class if she hadn't purposely let her grades slide just a little because she was terrified of the thought of having to give the Commencement Address at her graduation.
She would have excelled at college, but she never went. A college education didn't even seem like a plausible possibility for a poor Southern girl from her neck of the woods, so despite her teachers' encouragement to her to go she got a bank job after high school instead.
She could have had any man she wanted, but she found the man of her dreams in a Marine uniform,...
...married him, and nearly 55 years later they are still very much in love!
Just 2 years later I came along, with 3 other children soon to follow.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
When I was young, I never thought of her as a "real" person. She was Mama, that's all. Her life revolved around her home and her family, her days filled with making both happy.
But as I've gotten older, I've come to appreciate and imagine what she must have been like in her younger days...
...before she was Mama.
February 10, 2009
THE BLIMP
[In honor of my mother's birthday today,
I share with you one of her famous stories]
photo from wikipedia.comIt was a hot, humid, muggy day at the County Line homestead. A normal, quiet afternoon in the summer of 1975. I had just graduated from high school and was working at my job that summer, as a carhop/waitress at the K & J Drive-In. Dad was at work, my 7-year-old brother Mark was playing with the neighbor boy down the road.
My two sisters, 15-year-old Barbara and 13-year-old Maria, were upstairs in the room they shared doing whatever teenage girls do on a lazy, summer afternoon.
Mama was sitting in her normal spot, at her sewing machine, facing a window to take advantage of the good light there. She had been working on some college clothes for me as I would soon be off to IU. When she looked up from her sewing, what she saw TERRIFIED her!
Coming straight toward the very window where she was sitting, seemingly at eye level, was the humongous nose of a blimp! Yes, a BLIMP, of all things! The image practically filled the whole window!
Mama jumped up from her chair, screaming and hollering, "GET OUT! We've gotta get out!!!" She was sure the blimp was about to crash into the house!
Barbara came partway down the stairs, which were right there beside the window, and Mama grabbed her hand and dragged her outside, screaming all the time, "Get out!!!"
Maria, for whatever reason (maybe she was taking a nap!), didn't hear all the commotion and despite all the panicked excitement stayed inside the house oblivious to it all. (Mama said later she really didn't know where Maria was at the time and felt terrible that she hadn't gone up after her. We assured Mama we weren't sure Maria was worth saving....JUST KIDDING, ReeZee!)
Mama and Barbara scrambled out into the yard just in time to see a gigantic blimp just barely clear the top of the house, some lines hanging down from the blimp actually
grazing the roof. They watched it slowly meander on, across the road and over the cornfield, seeming to get lower all the time.
Mark and the neighbor boy also saw the blimp coming from his house down the road. Of course, as 7-year-old boys they had no fear or awareness of the danger involved.
To them, it was just plain exciting!
As soon as I drove into the driveway after work (I missed the whole thing!), Mama ran to meet me and tell me about the blimp's near-miss with our house. It was a spectacular tale, hard to believe, surely not as potentially disastrous as she made it out to be.
Later that evening, the local paper ran a story and photo of a blimp with a drunk pilot that had gotten caught in some power lines near New Castle. Apparently the heavy, humid air along with the pilot's impairment had caused flying problems for the blimp.
We've teased Mama over the years for embellishing the story, but she claims it happened just as she said. She still cringes when she sees a blimp...I think it scarred her for life! To this day, none of us will ever look at a blimp quite the same way!
Wishing you a very Happy Birthday, Mama! I love you!!!
