My parents
I talk a lot about my parents because, for most of my life, I’ve been imitating them, not slavishly, but consciously trying to take their best qualities into my own life. I married a man with many similarities to my father. I have the same number of children as my mother. Now, that was not intentionally to limit the size of our family, but to encourage as many children as God wanted to send. He wanted my husband and I to have seven.
My mother served in church organizations all her life: teaching Sunday School to adults, Primary classes to children, nursery classes for 18 month to 3 year olds, women’s classes, talks before the whole congregation, choir directing, leading the congregational singing, playing piano and organ and helping her children with whatever instruments they tried. She graduated from the University of Wyoming in 1954, and taught school, including band, for years. At 22 she married my father, age 29, a man who grew up in the same small town she did. He had spent several years in the army during World War II followed by a two-year church mission to Louisville, Kentucky. He eventually earned a bachelor’s degree on the GI Bill. He worked a lot of jobs, selling hardware, shoes, fruit; he worked as a business instructor in the same high school I eventually attended. By the time I got there he was a church custodian. He gardened and she canned the produce. He built the food dehydrator; she dried banana slices purchased cheap. She learned to make whole wheat bread fairly well. Even then white flour was prevalent; she studied nutrition and got rid of white flour pasta. She made whole wheat cookies with margarine when I was little in the 70s. She made tuna salad sandwiches with imitation mayonnaise; real tuna in Wyoming had to come from cans, and imitation mayo was cheaper than real, with a longer shelf life. He kept old leather boxing gloves for his four sons to use when they just needed to hit something. In the garage they kept 300 pounds of wheat and several boxes of lard, in case of disaster. He played ping pong with his children; in winter in the dining room and in summer on a real ping pong table in the garage. They shopped yard sales and gave their children new socks and underwear for Christmas, along with books. My father repaired cars and redid the inside of his home, leveled the floor of the sinking front porch and installed a wood stove for house heat. Every year into his 80s he went up on the mountain to bring down wood for the stove. He dug a root cellar under the house and connected it to the cement basement full of jars on shelves. He watered the garden from our own well, with its pump in the basement. My mother made a lot of my clothes until I was a teen, including elasticized polyester slacks. She made my little sister and I matching blue dresses for my oldest sister’s wedding reception at the church. She also made the cream cheese mints and learned to decorate cakes.
My parents helped my husband and I with several of our moves across country. At one point my mother commented that my marker labeling on moving boxes looked just like her printing. I told her it was conscious imitation. It’s clear, it’s easy to read, and it reminds me of her careful hand-lettering of posters and visual aids for classes. Learn everything, they taught by doing. It is appropriate to post this on February 14th; it is a love letter to them.
