Happy birthday, Mom!

My mom, Mildred Hume Mastin Weedon, would be 105 today. All my memories of her are during menopause (she was 40 when I was born!), so I can never think of her without her “sweat towel” (a little tea towel she kept handy to wipe the sweat and to fan herself). She loved to laugh, and visiting with her sisters was always her great joy. They’d sit on the screened porch all afternoon, snapping beans, and then all evening, visiting. She had a very soft spot for, of all things, laundry. She loved doing it with my Aunt Emma. She was a fabulous short order cook (and she really did ask what we wanted and then made it up for us). The pic is before she was stricken with polio as a child. It left her with one leg shorter than the other. She said she never could keep up with her siblings because of it, and so she turned to reading. Her Aunt Annie (her father’s older sister) had taught her well: “With a good book I can travel the world and never leave this rocker!” And she did travel the world in her reading. She had a special place in her heart for poetry. She loved simple children’s poetry above all: Eugene Field (a distant cousin) was one of her favorites; but also Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. I still remember many of those in her voice: “How I love to go up in a swing, up in the air so blue…” She never quite lost her Virginia accent so she pronounced “flow” for floor, “doh” for door. And we always knew that “home” wasn’t Maryland, but back to Richardsville. In Maryland, she was downright reclusive (yes, I know where I get it from). I remember her trying to teach me “hop scotch” as a youngster, though her hopping was always nerve-wracking! Remember, she was crippled. She doted on all her children AND her grandchildren, not to mention her nephews and nieces. I miss her very much. She died back in 1994 at Thanksgiving.