On the car ride to mom's house, my oldest daughter turned to her brand new fiance and said, "I can't wait for you to meet my grandma. She lives in the middle of cotton and corn fields yet every time we go to her house she has some random person visiting her and you'll never be able to figure out how these two people could ever meet in this life, let alone be spending friend time together in the middle of nowhere."
I said nothing but thought she was setting him up for disappointment. Who could live up to such billing?
Sure, my mom has always been a character. And yes, there were times when I'd come home to strangers in the house. But this wasn't an everyday thing.
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We passed the dairies, the farms, the little houses on large lots and then finally made the right turn down the road that begins with pavement but turned to dirt just as you reach my parents' house/small farm.
We took the long walk up to the front porch and I began to knock on the screen door.
Too late- mom energetically swung open the door and proclaimed:
"You all need to go down into the basement. There's a Japanese girl who drove up on a Harley. Doesn't speak a lick of English. And we think her name is Meow!"
My daughter smiled approvingly, and said, "Grandma- this is Greg. We're getting married!"
And after that, we followed mom downstairs to meet Meow? (I'm sure I'm misspelling her name.)
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That's right. My mom is a not your everyday relative.
She raised seven kids... Has too many grandkids & great grandkids for me to count up in my head at the moment.
She knows what it's like to lose a father. And a mother.
She knows the heartache of having a husband at war for a year... and writing him a letter every single day during that unending year.
She's a friend to the friendless.
She sees no color, no handicap, and no malice in anyone.
Because of her, we learned sign language. We visited prisoners. We mowed lawns or did chores for people she had just met.
Her personal machinery is driven by the fuel of love.
If cloning were ethical, I would collect my mom's best traits and add them to the human genome.
I feel this way about her, but the beautiful thing is that you probably have similar feelings about your mother or any of the women in your life.
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I have had the good fortune to have a great mom, and four fabulous sisters and five amazing daughters and four adorable granddaughters.
Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there.
Thank you for continually bringing us the unexpected.
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