A Wednesday for Remembering
This entry was posted on 4/30/2008 2:16 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
I woke up in the middle of the night last night to the realization that I hadn't written my Tuesday blog entry. You have to understand that while I am a procrastinator by nature, I am obsessive about meeting dates and deadlines, and I always write in my blog on Tuesdays and Fridays. So how did I manage to let Tuesday slip by me?
On the way to work this morning, I discovered why I was meant to write my entry today, instead. My husband's mother, my dear mom-in-law Clara passed away last night after a long illness.
Born in the 1920's, she worked all her life. Starting at home in rural Arkansas with her 10 brothers and sisters, she was raised doing farm work and picking cotton. During WWII, she did a stint in a sock factory (where the knitting machine got away from her and knitted the world's longest sock) and in an aircraft factory. Imagine Clara the Riveter. After that she turned to cooking—her lifelong vocation. She cooked in various restaurants until she retired in the early 1990s.
Then, she took up crafting. The first time I walked into her house, she had 15 wreaths hanging in her hallway. She was into wreath making in a big way. When I married her son, she baked and decorated our wedding cake and presented us with a handmade quilt. Now, we probably have six of her quilts. She even cross stitched and embroidered each square of a whole quilt top once and painted another. She made dozens of lap quilts for her church. Then, she took painting lessons—oils and watercolor. Everyone in the family received at least one of her paintings. Three of her works now live in my living room. And she used blue thread to crochet the valences for my kitchen windows when we bought our first house in 1992. Her crocheted doilies, in fact, covered every flat surface in her house and some in mine. (She also talked about tatting, but I never saw her actually produce any.) In her 70s, she started learning to play the guitar and often amused the kids by playing the mouthbow. We even worked on writing a cookbook together—that's how I really learned to cook. Many of my favorite recipes that I share here or on my website came from her.
Although she wouldn't have thought about it that way, Clara truly lived the creative life that I often babble about. She was all about "making stuff" and always wanted to know what I was working on. She was also the glue that held my husband's family together, and she will be missed.
