Happy Mother's Day

When I went to see the sandhill cranes a while back, I took my old Pentax that has been sitting idle. When I developed the film, I discovered I started the film last summer, when my mom was visiting. Here she is last summer at 85.

For Mothers Day, I'll try to keep this short by listing ten important things my mom passed on to me

1. When you help other people you get back far more than you give
2. Make peace before you go to bed, never go to bed angry at (your child, spouse, parent, etc.)
   
3. There isn't just one way to see things. My mother came to the US alone at age 17 from Nazi Germany in 1939. While she has always appreciated the country that took her in, she never took things for granted - either the good things or the bad.
4. How to take care of myself - cook, hang up the laundry, iron my own clothes, and many other things.
5. How to get a lot done with the time you have. My mom always worked, from the week she arrived in the US when she started as a baby nurse until last May when she 'retired' at 85 from the medical office she'd worked in since 1949. She couldn't waste time and had everything organized, like the different stops on her way home to get what we needed, or having lunches ready to go the night before.
6. That everyone was important and to be treated with respect. I was about five when I recited "eeny, meeny, miney, mo, catch a Nigger by the toe." She pulled the car over to the side of the road and asked me what I had said and we had a long discussion about what it meant and why I was never to use that word.
7. Don't leave the lights on, and turn off the water while you brush your teeth.
8. Worrying is important if it gets you to do what you need to do. Beyond that it is a waste of energy and life. My mom saw everything that could go wrong and worried about it. I guess that comes from being a Jewish girl when Hitler came to power. She emailed me today that she just listened to a CD of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. It's a fantasy novel about how Nazis could have come to power in the US in the 1930s. It brought back memories, "Actually I was 11 yrs. when Hitler came to power in 1933. No wonder I wasn't afraid like the older people. What possibly could happen until I found out. They first thought he would be thru in 3 months and after that they became concerned, but then it was too late." I learned to be prepared and to think out all my options, but NOT to worry when there was nothing more I could do.
9. Let go. Even though she worried, she never said a thing to me when I took off to teach in Thailand with the Peace Corps long ago. She has accepted my living far away in Alaska with grace and has never used guilt on me. I've tried to give my own kids the same freedom to live their own lives.
   
10. To love the ocean.
    

This picture of my mother and daughter was also on that role of film.