Variations on "Lessons My Mother Taught Me"

My mother, Wyora, taught me that it is OK to give a child extraordinary freedom.  In fact, I didn’t know I had that freedom until the women in the writer’s group asked me how I got out to the movies so often when I was young.  I thought everyone in the world did their assigned housework on Saturday morning from 8 am to noon and then could go to the movies with the babysitting money they had earned for the week.  I didn’t have to tell where I was going or when I would be back. That is just the way things operated at our house.

My mother taught me that there are extra-ordinary treasures in doing unassigned house work.    I liked to make her bed in the morning.  I knew that sometimes under the pillow on her bed, there might be a partially eaten large Jersey Milk chocolate bar.   She worked on using intermittent rewards with me, never asking where the chocolate bar had gone.

My mother taught me that anyone can do the laundry.  The washing machine was downstairs – a wringer washer.  The only difficult part of doing was to pick the clothes out of the hot water with a stick, get the clothes close to the ringer, and then get the stick and my hand away before one or the other got into the ringer.  The clothes fell into the rinse water where I was to plunge them up and down again, swing the ringer around and squeeze the water out of them,  and then they were taken outside to hang on the clothes line.  I was taught to put thee diapers on, the last corner of each diaper being pinned to the first corner of the next diaper, thus saving on the number of wooden pins, since we didn’t really have enough to hang out all of the wash. I was thrilled when my mother brought home an apron to put around my waist, the pockets of which were large and bulky, and slanted on the sides so that I could get at the pins easier than when they were hanging in a bucket from the trolley of the clothesline wire.  She also taught me how to get good at holding the clothes pins in my mouth, the small end  facing my tonsils to that when I slipped one clothes pin out of my mouth and pinched it, it was ready to go on the clothes lines. Two clothes lines were strung across the yard – one from the basement to Mrs. Cockerton’s fence and one from the side porch door to Mrs. Cockerton’s fence.  We had long lines of washing.

My mother taught me to serve Sunday dinner on the dining room table and with the best dishes in the house.  Extra table leaves were added to the table for she also taught me that Sunday is the day to invite guests over for dinner.  The menu was standard at our house: a pot roast, seared before we left for church and then roasted in the oven until we returned home. She added vegetables and a salad and guests.

My mother taught me to make dessert a regular event.  I  thought everyone had pie for dessert on Sunday -- banana cream, or lemon meringue or apple pies in the fall.  Then the kind of desserts moved with the times and fads.  We had refrigerator desserts for a while – a frozen chocolate filling with graham wafers crumbs above and below, or a maple version of that dessert called Honeymoon Dessert  When Doral learned he could buy two and a half gallons of ice cream from the Palm Dairy outlet at a discounted price, our deep freeze could be opened and ice cream would always be there -- dessert every day of the week.  Sometimes there was already a spoon in the ice cream left there by last person dig out their evening snack. 

Wyora like maple walnut ice-cream, not a favourite of anyone else in the family.  When Doral would buy it, there would be a look pass between the two of them.  He would always say the same words to the groaning rest of us:  “This is your mother’s favourite.”   She would say, “Yes,” give a small apologetic smile to the rest of us who didn’t like that flavour ... and then his eyes would be filled with love and her eyes would dance as she would eat it.  Yes, my mother taught me, dessert is good.

(More to be written on the theme "Lessons My Mother Taught Me" for Mother’s Day 2012)

Arta