Memories

As I sit here at this keyboard this day, it comes to me that it is time to share memories as they need to be shared before there is no time to share them anymore. Not that I am being maudlin, but I just want to put them down as I have been hoarding them and I feel the need to let them out.

I wrote a lot in TT comments on the aniversary of dad's birthday. That is what has opened the log jam. Things like the statement that he used to use about having to sight on a fence post to see if something or someone was actually moving. It is an old farmers way of talking about things that were moving slowly. He talked of a team of horses pulling a stone sled. I dont remember why they had them but they did use them to train horses to pull a load. It was a wooden sled with a lot of rocks in it. I remember it around the Anderson place when I was young.

I remember the cooking things better than most I guess because cooking and baking were a special memory for me. It is something I got from mom. For some reason, she spent time teaching me kitchen things. And I love it to this day. She taught me to make cocoa from scratch. I baked cakes with her. That is why I know that a cup was a coffee cup and a teaspoon was the one we had on the table. The table spoon measure was the one that was used for soup and serving. Egg shells made for good coffee. And the coffee did not get good until the pot was half full of grounds. And never wash the coffee pot because it would spoil the flavor for at least a month.

I remember talks with dad after mom died. I was only 13 at the time and did not really understand much about what was being said at the time. But looking back from the years I have reached, I start to see some of what he was trying to say. He missed her terribly. He had taken off work to be with her at the end. He knew the end was near as the doctor had told him that she had a week or two and that the pain was going to be bad for her but she would be as sedated as possible. The doctor told him that he had only just begun to get to the early stages of morphine injections just before she died. Dad told me how he had been sleeping in the chair in the room with her and he heard her breathing change. How she had been fighting for air. She succumbed to pnuemonia at the end, what he said was called the sick persons friend. He talked about the love between a man and a woman to me a teenage boy and I did not then understand. I do now. But it took me almost another 5o years to do so. God, do I miss them both.

He told us after the funeral about the fact that twice before in his life he had seen families broken up when the mother had died and HE would not let that happen to his children. I never forgot that lesson. When the accident happened to my family and Laurie was killed and the rest of the family in the hospital, he asked me why I had not opted to have my children taken care of by others but insisted that I take them home and I told him that it was the lesson I had learned from him. He cried.

He always told me that anything that he and I could do together, he called it pulling in a double harness, would alway be something that would get finished. I never forgot that. I passed it on as the lesson that you do what ever you need to do to get the job done. And the job has always been family. That is the only job we have. The rest is details.

Dear sibs, there is one more lesson I learned. I don't know if you know this so I am going to pass it on. Dad told me that at the end of her life, mom did one of the hardest and bravest things possible. She knew she was dying. She could very easily have given into grief and sense of loss. That is the normal thing. She could have pulled us close and hung on to us in her final days. But she did not. She and he discussed it and she decided that we need to be turned to dad. He would be who was there with us after she had gone. So she did that. She turned us away, gently, to our father. It made the grieving easier and our subsequent lives easier. But not her end. For that I love her.

From our parents, I learned lessons that I have tried to formulate in my own way as 3 laws of family. Borrowing heavily on the great author Isaac Asimov, they go like this.

Law 1. Family comes first. Take care of your family in all things before all other things.

Law 2. Take care of the individual members of your family as long as it does not cause harm to the entire family.

Law 3. Take care of yourself as long as it does not interfere with the first 2 laws.

This to me means that as long as you do this, you should never have to worry about yourself as the others in the family will have done it for you. So on this basis I give you all, siblings and children, my love and my promise to live this way.