When I was growing up, Mom kept a bulletin board by our kitchen telephone. It held school notices and interesting items clipped from the newspaper. It held an annotated calendar, scheduling all our family’s games, practices, meetings and appointments. It even set out my sister and my “horse days”. We rode on alternate days, a fair solution to our one-horse-two-riders issue.
This was before computers, and one of my Mom’s most prized possessions was her ancient boat anchor of a typewriter. She liked to type up and post quotes she found to be inspirational, always, of course, with proper attribution. Credit where credit was due!
All us kids absorbed Mom’s quotes as we spent hours tethered by the handset’s springy curly cord to that plastic box on the wall. Sprawling on the floor, balancing on the counter, slouching on the stool gazing into space, and at the bulletin board. I never gave even a passing thought to privacy back then, I just chattered away gaily to my friends, and as I grew older, to my boyfriends. How quaint it all seems now.
Mom died in 2012, she would have been 78 this year. The bulletin board, the landline wall phone, the kitchen in my childhood home; it’s all gone, along with my youth.
But I still have my memories, and my Mom’s quotes. She had bundled them together with a metal clip and tucked them away, we found them while sorting stuff after her death. We used some of them on her memorial service brochure. We read them for comfort in the first days of our loss. Her grand daughter now has some of Grandma’s words tattooed down her side.
It is quite something how those words my Mom loved and shared with her family have taken on a life of their own. I think she would enjoy that.
Love you Mom. Happy birthday.
