Often when I look in the mirror, I see my mother staring back at me. It’s not so much that I look like her. She was tall and I’m short. Our hair and eyes are the same color, but I think it is more of an expression that catches my eye. She indelibly imprinted her character on me, and it shows. Mothers unwittingly do that to their children. So many of the things I love and do are what she did. Her attitudes were passed to me.
I love to garden and can’t wait to put my shovel in the ground in the spring. My mother always had a gorgeous garden. The vegetables were always huge, consistent in size and taste. She won prizes at the county fair with her produce. Her flower garden was colorful and bright from early spring to late fall. Even when disaster struck, because of her indomitable hope and faith, she managed to make it a success.
I remember one summer, Mother had a particularly beautiful garden. The cucumbers and the summer squash were just starting to come on. The flowers were rich in bloom and gloriously beautiful. Butterflies flitted here and there. Truly, it was a Garden of Eden.
We had been having light rains, but not the usual monsoon season that happened in early July and August. One Sunday morning I went to church. During the service, I heard the crash of thunder and saw the lightning through the tall church windows. Then I heard the hail. The roar was thunderous. I thought every window in the building would shatter. After the meeting, I hurried home. My heart grew heavier and heavier as I drove toward home.
The shredded leaves on the trees were covered with a heavy blanket of hail and looked like winter branches stark against the sky. As I drove into the yard, my heart hit the ground. There were two of our prize horses lying dead in the road and another horse stood shivering beside them. At first, I thought the hail had killed them. I shuddered. Mom had warned me not to go jogging in the rain because it was dangerous. I, of course, had my own ideas until I saw the horses.
As I walked into the yard, tears flooded down my cheeks. Mother’s yard was in shreds. The leaves of the plants were tattered. The once beautiful rose petals sailed, like little boats, down the muddy river of water and hail that made a ditch through the once-green grass.
I walked into the house. Mom was sitting there in the rocker with tears streaming down her face. I thought of the hours she had spent in that garden. Every morning, she was up at 5 a.m., watering, hoeing and cultivating. Now all her work was ruined.
“Maybe, I took too much pride in it,” she said simply.
She didn’t look to God and complain, like the apostles of old who asked, “Lord, is it I?” She searched for answers in her own heart.
I shook my head no and hugged her and told her I was sorry and it wasn’t her fault.
She told me about the horses. Lightning struck in the middle of the corral and blew all three horses over the fence, killing two and stunning the other.
Later as the rain subsided, she and Dad walked down to see the horses. I watched from the window as they walked toward the horses through the devastation and shambles of the hailstorm. It occurred to me that was the way my parents were – always hand in hand, facing adversity and trouble with courage.
Mother didn’t sit down and say, “My garden is ruined, I’ll take the summer off.” Her prayer at breakfast was, “Father in Heaven, please bless the garden to come back.” She resolutely went to the garden and began propping up wilted plants and cleaning the debris. Miraculously, the garden came back after the hailstorm. Perhaps it wasn’t quite as beautiful as it would have been, but we had a wonderful harvest that year. Mother was a woman of faith, and she worked to help the Lord make her prayers come to pass.
As I walk across the field today, I remember a story Mother told. When my mother was a child, she gardened with her grandmother. She would follow her grandmother everywhere and even tried to put her feet in her tracks. They gardened together for many years.
One day, years later, when she was gardening at the old ranch where she used to garden with her grandmother as a child, she walked along in the newly plowed earth. She saw tracks. She stopped and stared at them. Her heart began to pound. Those were Grandma’s tracks! Grandma had been dead for years, but those were her tracks. Mom studied the tracks for a long time before she realized they were her own tracks. She had spent so much time walking in her grandmother’s footprints as a child that she walked just like her in later years.
My mother was a superwoman. She gardened, drove a tractor, built fence, branded calves, cleaned and dressed chickens, cleaned the house, cooked for the family, bottled at least 100 quarts of each kind of vegetable in the fall and raised six children to love to work.
She never missed an opportunity to bandage a wounded knee or a cut hand. She always had a kind word in the mornings and made you feel you were doing great; but she never let you get away with less than your best.
I marvel as the years go by with all she had to do, how she ever taught us to do everything. I find that it is so much easier to do a project yourself than to teach a child to do it. Teaching children is tedious and time-consuming. You have to put up with a sloppy job until the child gets the desire and skill to do it right. That takes years. No wonder so many give up and do it themselves.
Not my mother. She lived through the bread that had too much oil and was leathery. She lived through the too-much-flour stage when the bread was stiff and hard. She even lived through the stage where bread was flat because the yeast got too hot. She lived through the cakes that had salt instead of sugar in the batter. She lived through the pea casserole recipes and the flavorless stews. She lived through the messy counters, the food baked on the stove and the water all over the floor after the dishes were done. She even lived through the days of being attacked by dishes falling out of the cupboards and pots and pans crashing to the floor when the doors were open because the child didn’t put them away properly.
When I was 3 years old, I was burned severely with scalding soup. I spent months in bed treading that delicate balance between life and death. Mother and Daddy hovered over me day and night caring for my wounds and trying to make me comfortable. The doctors gave me little hope of survival. There was nothing to ease the pain. There were no miracle cures, just watching, waiting and praying. I can only imagine the terrible agony of the nightmare my parents lived through in those months.
When I finally started to walk again, I walked doubled over as the scars started to form on my midriff. Mother encouraged me to stand up straight, to fight against the pain. It would have been easy for her give up with my cries of protest and pain. It would have been easy for her to look the other way and allow me to go through life doubled over with the terrible scars, but she taught me to resist the pain and stand tall. Three-year-olds don’t have much stamina, but Mothers who care do. She stayed with the problem until it was solved. I’ll never know what it’s like to be handicapped because Mother cared enough to help me go on when I couldn’t do it on my own.
When I look in the mirror and see my mother, I am forever grateful for a mother who left tracks in the newly plowed ground for me to follow.
