Happy Mother's Day
I want to pay tribute to my mother, Zenith Olive. She was born in 1915 to a large family of eight, if I'm counting right. Five girls and one boy plus father and mother.
Her father was sent to a facility for people with mental problems, leaving her mother to deal with the children. Her mother remarried to an abusive type man, and when she found herself with another child coming in 1919, she went wading in the middle of the winter barefoot and caught the flu epidemic that was prevalent at that time and died.
The children were farmed out to relatives, and she ended up with one family whose children were mean to her. There were other homes after that I don't have details for.
She and my father married, and there were six in our family. My dad farmed and worked for an auto wrecking company--we called it a "junk yard." He was a very hard worker as was my mother, also.
The picture of the woman milking a cow could have been Zenith. She milked two cows - once in the morning and once in the evening. She could chop wood with an axe like a man. She was a stay-at-home mother while we were small. She sewed many of my clothes for school, and she cooked great food without using a recipe.
When we came home from school, there were freshly baked blackberry or raspberry cookies waiting for us. Once in a while, she would bake bread. Our steady diet consisted of pinto beans and corn bread which we shared with the dogs after we finished supper. No dog food for them.
Punishment came in the order of a small switch that would sting our legs. Sometimes, we would cry before she ever touched us. We always deserved the switching, and no one sassed or argued with my mom. We never even tried it.
We all finished high school. When I would encounter a math problem, I couldn't solve, she helped with it...such as how many gallons of paint would it take to paint a barn. My mom only got through eighth grade; but she was very intelligent, and my father had to help on his parent's farm. I think that he got to third grade. He could barely write his name.
We lost our parents in 1972. My dad had a bad heart and suffered from diabetes. They could not afford hospitals and doctors. My mom had developed manic depression and shot herself a week or so after my father died.
I still miss her so much. I guess I didn't appreciate her when I was a youngster, but I would give anything to have a chance to see her again. I have to believe that she died as a Christian. She was always singing gospel songs. It was funny when she spoke of our neighbor lady singing "I'll fly away." Maybe she knew more about her than I did.
"I was country when country wasn't cool," as the song goes. An old saying is "that you can take the girl out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the girl." The Lord looked out for four children, and now we are all in our seventies.
God certainly knew what He was doing when He created mothers...one of the best things He ever did. The End.
