A mom turns 70

My mom celebrated her 70th birthday today. Mom invited her sister Sandy to come play duets in church (mom on organ, Sandy on piano), and then after church have a party with friends and cousins. My mom and aunt Sandy have a lot of cousins.

Mom and aunt Sandy grew up playing duets in church because my grandma was the church organist for their Methodist church for decades. A summer visit to my grandparents meant thunderous joyful duets in church (mostly the postlude) with my grandma on the organ and mom on the piano. If luck would have it that we were all visiting at the same time, mom and Sandy would play. People would not get up and file out, they would stay and listen and applaud like crazy when they finished. It was the same after church today. The congregation and choir started to applaud, and then mom and Sandy launched into 'Happy Birthday', followed by a very solemn 'Amen'. Haha..

 

We wandered down to the party room, where a lot of yummy potluck food was waiting. We had a good time visiting with relatives and watching a continuous slide show of family pictures from all stages of mom's life thus far... She has traveled so many different places, and is still doing it now. In a few weeks she will be flying to Paris, and at the end of the year she is traveling to South America for a five weeks tour where she will visit Argentina, the Easter Islands, Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia and a whole bunch of stuff I am forgetting.

My SIL made a memory book and asked everybody to write down a specific memory of an event they shared with mom. I wrote about the time mom and I drove across country, on our way home from Boston. I was 21, and it was in August, just a few days after my birthday. I flew to Boston, where my mom and my brother were waiting to pick me up at the airport. Mom had previously drove from CO to Washington D.C., where my brother lived, and they drove up to Boston. When I arrived, we did the touristy things you do in Boston, including a visit to "Cheers", for a celebratory beer in honor of my birthday. Trouble is, I left my luggage at the airport, in a luggage locker. Including my purse and I.D. :(.

We left Boston and drove north, visiting places along the way. Kennebunkport, LL Bean flagship store in Portland, Bar Harbor, and then camped in a campground in Acadia National Park. It was our last family adventure. We camped, we drove, we got lost, we hiked, we bickered, we ate....we had such good time. We saw my brother off on a plane back to D.C., and mom and I continued to meander our way home. We saw the Man in the Mountain in N.H., crossed Lake Champlain on a car ferry, drove into Canada, came back across and braved a desolate, scary-looking Detroit, drove through morning rush hour traffic in Chicago (that was an experience), saw our old house in Madison, WI, and then came on home. It was a lot of fun. My mom is the best travel companion. Our family has the habit of driving on blue highways, so we see a lot more of what there is to see, and get invariably lost several times. In getting lost we have made so many neat discoveries, hole-in-the-wall eateries, colorful people...my mom embraces that experience above 'getting there'. I love that about her. :)

Happy Birthday, mom. Thank you for all you provided me, taught me, and modeled for me.

 

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