Tomorrow is Remembrance Day and since I am different or as my children would say "eccentric" I am not thinking of a war hero at the moment. I am thinking of another hero in my life. I guess I should say a heroine.

My mind has been traveling today back to my youth and memories of one of the dearest, most wonderful women that "God" ever put on this earth. My Mother. 

I lost my Mother August 15th 1986 and to this day I do not think I have truly dealt with that loss entirely.I will be 48 in April and I still have times when I miss my Mother more then words can truly express. As far back as I can remember I knew how special she was.

When she was young she took care of 7 brothers and a sister who died at 4 by falling down an open well. Mother worked in the sugar bush from the time she was 10 carrying pails of sap in both hands and a brother on her shoulders from the bush to the shed where it was boiled down. She worked in fields and in the house as well. Her life was a life of hard work and little thanks.

She was 26 when she married for the first time. She was married to a policeman first and he was shot on duty a brief 2 years later. He was her first love. A few years later she married an abuser and had 2 children. Margaret and Johnny. For years she lived an abused life until one blessed day he left and she never heard from him again. She lived on her own with her children for many years after that, running a boarding house to support them and make ends meet. She also took in kids from the CAS to house until they were placed in permanent homes. She had a baby-sitter come in now and then so she could go to town for weekly supplies.

That baby-sitter was pregnant with me and not married and had many more children already. When I was a little over 8 months old the lady who gave me birth was notified that the CAS was going to take  all her children away and put them in the children's aid. So she told my Mother and my Mother went to the CAS and asked if she could have me. Although single women did not really qualify at that time, because my Mother worked for them they let her have me.

She took me in when I was 9 months old to raise and love me. When I was 4 she met the man she would marry for the last time. I was 12 when they finally married. The man she chose to be my Father was as wonderful and good hearted as she was.

My Mother worked hard and I can remember her working nights at a chicken factory in Palmerston, Ontario and days in an old folks home. When she married my Father that stopped. He was a class A mechanic and insisted on taking care of her on his wages. When my Mother's Mother took ill we moved into her little tiny house so my Mother could take care of her until her death. We continued living in that tiny house until I grew up and left home. The house was small and there was only one bedroom. My parents slept in the attic until Gramma died and then they took her room and I slept on a fold up cot in the tiny living room at night and folded it up in the daytime.

I can remember coming home on the school bus and walking in the house and smelling fresh baked bread or cookies or pies. I can remember pulling weeds until my hands hurt and chopping kindling so it was ready to light the fire in the morning in the old wood stove. I can remember picking rocks from the garden and from the fields so the harrows did not catch them in the blades. I can remember throwing bales of hay until my arms ached. I can remember taking frozen sheets off the clothesline and freezing my fingers til they were blue. I can remember shoveling snow until the tears ran from the cold. I remember piling wood so that we had a well stocked woodpile for winter. I remember carrying the ashes from the wood stove in a pail and dumping them down the outhouse hole or out in the garden so they could be ground into the ground come spring. I can remember carrying pails and pails of water from the well to water the garden and to fill the reservoir in the wood stove.

What I remember most though is that my Mother worked right along beside me. She never made me do anything that she would not do herself. We had an out house because we could not have a bathroom in the tiny house we were in due to the fact that it was to close to the road and some kind of health requirements I remember watching my Mother as she swung a scythe cutting down weeds along the fence line or the road. 

My Mother would wallpaper the inside of that outhouse a couple times a year. (My eldest daughter still remembers that and giggles). Mother put an old medicine cabinet in there to hold the toilet paper so it did not get wet when it rained. I remember that there were 2 holes in that outhouse and I could never figure out why there had to be 2 when only one person was in there at a time.  LOL 

We had no room for a Christmas tree in that tiny house so my Mother would decorate the lilac bushes in the driveway ( this memory makes me giggle). My aunt made her a little tree out of a cardboard cone and macaroni spray painted gold and it sat on the counter behind the wood stove :). It was so pretty!! Mother would string lights along the porch and the little house of red was lit with colour when you pulled in the driveway :)

Ah yes I remember my Mother well. She was never without an apron inside or out. I can remember picking peas and filling her apron till it overflowed and she would carry them into the house. I remember her wearing her gum boots out to the garden in the mud after a rain because the weeds would be easier to pull then. I never saw my Mother when she did not have a dress on. Even in the cold of winter she wore a dress and if she was outside she would pull on a pair of Daddy's pants under it to keep her legs warm. What a sight she would be LOL -- Picture this -- My Mother wearing a blouse under a jumper and a pair of my Daddy's pants under that with gum boots on and a sweater heading to the outhouse or the garden. 

My Mother always wore a hair net so no hair would fall into whatever food she was preparing at the time. Oh boy could she cook!! That lady could make a feast out of nothing!! She could feed an army out of nothing!! I do not know how she managed sometimes but she did. Nothing came from a box or a can in those days of my youth. It was all home made from scratch. Pickles were homemade, bread homemade, veggies were from our own garden, meat was from our own animals.

My Mother never went to a hairdresser except when she absolutely had to in later years. She cut all our hair and gave me the most horrid Toni's  LOL  I looked like a frizz head sometimes. I can remember her doing my hair up in rags or long clothespins tied in so I had curls. Oh how I hated that!!! 

I have so many memories of my Mother and how we worked together. For tonight though that is it. I will definitely tell you more about my Mother and I another day. But the tears are starting to flow and the longing in my heart from missing her is strong so for now I will say goodnight.

God Bless
hugs
Misker
November 10/99