Pink carnations were her favorite flower. My mom was born in the spring of 1922, an only child. She married my Dad after four years of corresponding with him while he served as a medic in WWII. I was born a year later and my brother 20 months after that. I remember sitting on the couch with Mom in the afternoons. She did her letter writing then after all the housework was done. I was jealous of her making all those curly marks into meaning because I didn’t yet know how to read and write. She read to us and cooked for us. We sang songs together in the car while we drove. She canned fruit in mason jars and they went into the root cellar, all lined up pretty. My favorites were the pink and green-tinted pears.

The women in my family all did handwork–crochet and knitting. I learned to crochet when I was eight. It was a mark of being a member of the women of the family. I was proud.  I rarely saw my Mom without knitting needles or crochet hooks in her hands. She had bags of yarn everywhere. Yarn was like gold to her and she stashed it all over their homes, even under the bed and under the kitchen sink. I often thought that if I could put all the garments she created in one room it would fill it from top to bottom.

When I was nine Mom went to work, just for a time, until they could buy a freezer. She loved her job and worked her way up in the offices until she was in charge of one of them. She never stopped working until, lucky her, she got to retire at age 47. Daddy was 60 when they packed up and moved south to warmer climates. They had fun.  They square danced and swam and rode their bikes around their mobile home village. They had over thirty years of retired life.

When Daddy died Mom lost her best friend. She was amazed that Roger and I did some of our lives independently. She and Daddy did everything together and she didn’t really develop friendships of her own. She lived alone for about a year before dementia began to invade and then she moved to Vancouver where we could help her. She never lost her sense of humor and even when the dementia was really advanced she could still do crossword puzzles. She was smart, funny and feisty.

These last few years she always talked about “going home.” Sometimes that meant going back to her apartment in assisted living. Sometimes it meant going back to the home we had when I was a child. On January 13th Mom had a massive stroke and didn’t wake up. Tuesday, January 28th she died peacefully. Mom went home.