Slice of Life: Memories of My Parents

As I get ready to cook dinner, I chuckle to myself remembering what a struggle it was for mom to come up with meal ideas. We were absolutely no help when she asked what she should cook. The irony is that mom was a foodie. She loved the trips to Denver with her friends to go out to eat and see a show. She was always up for trying new foods, and she instilled the spirit of adventurous eating in my brother and me. We ate lima beans and Brussels sprouts, mangos and fresh coconut, and the best homemade Roquefort salad dressing I’ve ever had. Recipes from my childhood remain in rotation with new favorites: broccoli cheese soup (with bacon), cheesy beans and rice, chicken and wild rice, Lubbers Lounge LuLu, chili bean tostadas, and hamburger cobbler, to name a few. Thanks to mom, I never struggle to know what to cook for dinner.

Mom was a collector. She especially loved miniatures and antique glassware. But she also loved Boyd Bears, Hallmark ornaments, and apparently, scissors. I have her pinking shears and fabric shears, two smaller pairs of sewing scissors, the shears she used to cut hair, several pairs of our childhood scissors, multiple embroidery scissors, various manicure scissors including our baby fingernail scissors, and, naturally, a miniature pair of scissors.

Mom was an avid reader. She and a friend would go to the library sale every year and she’d come home with multiple grocery sacks full of books. She had a clever system for making sure she didn’t accidentally re-buy a book she’d already read. Inside the back cover of the myriad paperback mysteries she read, she’d pencil her initials. Then, when the sacks of library sale books had all been read, they were re-donated to the library. At the library sale, the back cover of each book was checked before the book was added to the sack of purchases.

Mom was an amazing seamstress, a devoted volunteer (Cub Scouts, swim meets, Bible School, reading buddy), and a creative gardener (she grew asparagus and tried her hand at breeding iris).

Most of all, mom was a great mom. She worked selflessly to make sure we had more and better than she did growing up. She died on March 11, 2017, just a few months before her 90th birthday.

Dad died on March 12, 1994. I still wonder if mom held on trying to make it to March 12, as if there were a special portal on that day that would take her straight to dad. She spent the final 23 years of her life without him. He was only 67 when he died and I had just started to get to know him adult-to-adult. As I now approach the age he was when he died (mom was the same age), I have a much greater empathy for her pain and her long years of loneliness.

My primary childhood memory of dad is that he was always working. He was the parts manager of the John Deere implement store and the needs of the local farmers, especially at harvest times, kept him behind the parts counter for long hours. I remember visiting him at work during Girl Scout cookie sales season and how special it was that he took time away from the parts counter to escort me to the “foreign” world of the tractor mechanics to sell my cookies.

When he wasn’t at work, dad was working in the yard. He was proud of the lawn and the trees he managed to grow in the arid high plains. When we wasn’t working in the yard, he was reading the paper, Popular Mechanics, or Smithsonian Magazine. While mom was the actively involved parent, dad was the rock of quiet strength.

There are more memories of each of them, of course. So many more. This slice barely skims the surface. If I could give them a message as I pause on March 11th and 12th, it would be a message of gratitude for my life, and to let them know that they remain an integral part of who I am and who I continue to become.