If Minnesota Transplant readers ever wonder where I got the desire to write about all things interesting and inane, you don’t have to look much farther than my mother.
I helped an author publish her book to Amazon recently (read more about that exercise here), and it reminded me how grateful I am for my mother. The book I helped publish to Amazon is titled, “Letters From Mom: A Daughter’s Journal of Healing” and it’s about how the author, Joyce Kocinski, dealt with her grief after her mother’s death. The narrative includes several letters written by her mother.
The exercise prompted me to sift through my own manila file of “Letters From Mom.”
Most of them were written pre-Facebook in her neat, entirely readable left-handed cursive. Mom still hand-writes letters to me, but now she sends missives via Facebook email quite often, including today’s message: “We received about an inch of much needed rain last night. A wildfire burned roughly 70 acres up by Menahga this week. How’s the second novel coming?”
Mom writes about all kinds of minutia in a lovely way that polishes daily activities like gardening, decorating and visiting into precious artifacts. I aspire to that art of converting the mundane into the extraordinary in this daily blog.
I appreciate Mom’s deadpan delivery, too. She makes me laugh. Here are a few comedic gems from the handwritten letters in my file.:
“Curt is in Long Prairie running this afternoon. He said he ran fast in practice yesterday. We bought something for his diarrhea. I hope it clears it up, so we don’t have to go the doctor, but we will if it doesn’t (Kay!).
For your reference, Curt was my brother, and Kay, to whom this letter was also addressed because we were living together at the time and who apparently delayed seeing a doctor, is my sister.
Here’s a note Mom wrote after I told her I was going for a hot air balloon ride:
“I trust you didn’t fall out of the balloon. Here’s a sample of the wallpaper in the bathroom, too. I’m about 3/4 of the way done.”
Sometimes she even includes pictures:
Phyllis and I lay out Sunday, and I lay out Saturday alone. I have a pretty good tan and also a pretty bad sunburn in a couple of places [drawing]. That area wasn’t exposed to the sun before this summer, I suppose.
Here’s Mom telling me about her weekend. “Bob” is my dad, and “Mills” is New York Mills, a tiny town in Central Minnesota near where my parents live:
“Sunday, Bob, Gene, Kenny, Jerome, Howard, Mark and Jay went golfing at a gold course set up in Howard’s pasture by Mills. It has greens and everything, but also sheep turds. It doesn’t cost anything and isn’t a bit crowded except for the sheep.”
Mom, I treasure you!
