Happy Birthday Mom

When I was little one of my favorite things to do was to go through my mother’s scrapbooks from her childhood.  She had tiny black and white photos of her family and friends at her house in Knoxville, Tennessee and at their lodge in the great Smokey Mountains.  I loved to look at the clothes they wore and the hairstyles they had back in the forties and fifties, so different from the style or non-style of the late sixties and seventies.

There were also many newspaper clippings of my mother from a picture of her at five years old receiving a “Call from Santa” to her engagement photo at the young age of twenty-one.  My favorite pages were the pictures of my mother and her dates taken at dances with the dance cards, and invitations attached to the pages.  One memorable invitation was a soda glass my mother had drawn with fluffy cotton coming out of the top to represent the bubbles and a real straw.  I used to tell her she was the best artist I had ever seen based on her scrapbook entries and she just shied away from that, not having started painting at that time.

I was always secretly glad that she did not end up marrying Woody Wood, who in an eighth grade cotillion photo was a good four or five inches shorter than my not very tall mother.  When I would point this out to her she would always say that he went on to be a successful dentist so I should think more highly of him.  I was just considering how short I might have ended up if he had been my father.

My mother was also a “College Girl” at Riches, the local department store.  That meant that she modeled clothes and appeared in advertisements.  I thought it was an incredibly glamorous thing to do and so grown up.  We had nothing like that in our small town of Wilton, Connecticut, not that I ever could have been a model.

Those images of my mother as a little girl all the way through college are burned into my brain and even though I was not alive during those times I still can see my mother’s beautiful face from then.  It is easy because she has hardly aged at all.  The only big change is her naturally straight hair now compared to her tight home permanent back then, now is so much better.

Today is her birthday and some decades later she still very much resembles that young girl climbing on the rocks of the river that ran by her parents lodge.  When I think of my mother I see her face in the pictures I have of her and the pictures she creates in her art.  Sometimes in her thirties she started painting and all that talent that was evident in her scrapbooks came pouring out.  She still paints almost everyday when she is home near her art barn.  I love that now I have not only pictures of her, but also pictures by her.  Happy Birthday Mom, thanks for all the scrapbooks that helped me know you better.