A collage of my Mother's recollections, gathered and shared over the decades:

• in high school during the late 1940s: her talent for diagramming sentences, her near-photographic ability to recollect things that she had read, her fear of one particularly tough teacher, and her soon-to-be spouse teaching her to drive, ...
• her church: friends, organists, pastors, food bank giveaways, and the Ngalamulume family of refugees from Africa that the church "adopted" ...
• her kind doctor, who was a school classmate of one of her sons ...
• her neighborhood, and her love of it since moving there more than fifty years ago, the kids who would offer to mow her lawn or pull up weeds, her back yard like an animal sanctuary nature preserve, the squirrels and raccoons that would sneak into the attic and crawl down into the furnace, and the friendly local cats that she fed and assigned names to — Bummer, Two Socks, Fat Cat, ...
• an encounter she once had with a stranger at a local McDonald's, when she was smiling to herself and had a friendly conversation late one day before an evening Lenten service ...
• her friends, whom she would drive to the grocery store, to church, to their medical appointments ...
• her work, at the local Federal Aviation Administration office and in the Post Office sorting mail and driving home between midnight and dawn ...
• the astronomically-long road trips she would take her sons on: once to Florida to see a solar eclipse (alas, it was cloudy during totality) and another time to West Texas to visit McDonald Observatory (where there was a gigantic-scary thunderstorm during the drive back to the motel on winding mountain roads) ...
• her pet peeves, including Daylight Savings Time ...

... and above all, her love for family and friends, and her gratitude for being blessed with such a happy life!

(cf. Bird's Nest on the Ground (2009-07-19), ...) - ^z - 2016-10-14