Celebrating My Mother

Well she's all you'd ever want,
She's the kind they'd like to flaunt and take to dinner.
Well she always knows her place.
She's got style, she's got grace, She's a winner.
She's a Lady.

When I think of my mother I think of her like that “she’s a lady”.  When she was younger men would ogle her in the grocery store, that’s how lovely she was.  When she walked about on the ship we sailed on coming to Canada people thought she was one of the Danish princesses, she walked with such style and grace.

                My mother has a quiet dignity about her but at the same time she has a fabulous sense of humour and can really enjoy a joke, especially when it is on her.  Recently we went together into the Staples shop to buy something for my camera and as we were leaving my mother saw some balls in one of the aisle baskets.  She picked it up and before I could say anything she attempted to bounce it to the floor to see how good it would bounce.  As it turned out it was a calculator shaped like a rubber ball which I had seen but she didn’t realize it until it made a terrible whack on the floor.  She looked at me, aghast, and I looked at her and we both ended up with a laughing fit that didn’t stop all the way across the parking lot.  I couldn’t catch my breath because every time I tried to tell her what I thought I would picture her face and go into another peal of laughter.

                What struck me as so hilarious was all the times she had told me not to touch anything, not to bounce any balls, not to even dream of picking one up and here she was destroying property at her ripe old age.  She could see the irony herself and went into more laughter.  It was one of the funniest shopping trips I’d ever had with my mother.  When I was little my mother was the main disciplinarian in the house because my father worked such long hours and she was so strict.  Many is the times I’ve gone to bed with a warm bum from a paddle with the wooden spoon although more often my sister and I would yell like banshees so Mom would stop quickly and once she left the room we would ask each other if we got hurt.  No, we would say and then giggle.  Little did we know that Mom stood on the other side of the door listening and she would be chuckling away at our shenanigans. 

                I am lucky to have had her as my Mom.

First photo is Mom with our cousins and her sister; bottom with me and Charlotte