My mam-ma passed away in April after a rash of problems that had left her in the hospital for weeks. It felt so very quick, she was here with us and then suddenly gone. I miss her so very much, it's impossible to convey, but I know you understand. She was an incredibly special person who had done so much with her life and influenced many, many people. Her numerous jobs and identities included:
1. Assembly-line worker during WWII for J. Paul Getty, building planes for the war
2. After returning to school in the sixties, a first-grade teacher who taught numerous people (myself included) to read and enjoy books
3. Mother, mam-ma, great mam-ma and Aunt Mildred to adoring relatives and friends
4. Caretaker of many friends
5. Sunday School teacher
6. Cook
7. Bell collector
It was only a few years ago that I realized that in our large family of various colorations, she was the one I resembled. Looking at old pictures of her she had pulled from drawers, I recognized the bone structure, lips and smile that are my own. But while family resemblance is skin deep, our passions are also very much the same.
She loved food, entertaining, cooking and cookbooks--of which she had an impressive collection. Some of those are now mine to cook with and use. Her recipes boxes, three small ones and one larger one, are packed with neatly-written recipes in her familiar script. I haven't had the opportunity to look through them all, but I'm sure I'll find some to share on bigYELLOWbowl.
And stuff. So much stuff. She loved thrift stores, antique malls and above all, garage sales. She threw more garage sales in a summer than most people do in a lifetime, collecting things from friends who were downsizing and selling them for their benefit. She had an array of dishes, some she'd had forever and others collected more recently. We would always go shopping at little out-of-the-way places and find some treasure to share. The clock in my kitchen was something we found together, as are several of my radios and some of my green, Depression glass. Nature or nurture, readers know that I suffer from these same afflictions. There is no more room for dishes in my house and my cookbooks are crammed into three shelves and include four binders of recipes that I have copied or clipped from various sources.
All of this is to say, I am a lot like her and I treasure the silly little things that were hers, old or new, that remind me of our relationship and the influence she is in my life. The week after the funeral, I popped into the DAV mainly out of habit. There was nothing there, and I know I say that often, but I really mean NOTHING. However, scanning the shelves of glassware, this one little pressed-glass sherbet caught my eye. Special? Probably not, but it is like the sherbets my Mam-ma had, that belonged to her mother and were a bonus in a bag of oats. She had given my dad six of them, and we found five more in her things. This makes twelve, which means my brother Eric and I can both have half-a-dozen.
Somehow the single sherbet was reassuring, like many of the things I had brought back from her vast collection; some cookbooks, a few bells, flower frogs, glasses and bowls. They aren't her, but they do hold a very tiny something of the wonderful, amazing person that she was. They help me to remember...
Me in my Great-grandma Stevenson's lap, with Mam-ma on the left and my Dad on the right.