Mom's birthday

Today would have been my Mom's 86th birthday. The photo above shows her at the age of 18 or 19, as a student at the University of Colorado. That's where she met my dad. She is sitting on the grass, working on a painting. At the end of her sophomore year she left college to marry my dad, who was in the Navy during the war. She always meant to finish her college degree in art, and nearly twenty years later she did.

In those twenty years between she raised my brother and sister and me and taught us to draw and paint and sew and used her talents to create costumes and prom dresses and decorate our house on a strict budget and lead Girl Scouts and Brownies and raise gardens and flowers and sing on long rides in the car and help my dad build a cabin in the mountains. And then she finished her degree and worked as the director of the YWCA where she established an art center and an art festival and a shelter for battered women and a place for people, old and young to meet and enjoy friends and shared interests. She was a friend, a mom, a wife, a grandmother, an advocate, an artist.

I can imagine her at 86 and I still feel cheated that she died before she got to be old. But I am lucky that she was my Mom.