A Mother’s Day story
It's Mother's Day today, so naturally I've been thinking about my mother. My mother, Katie, is buried in a cemetery across the Road from a Baptist Church, just a few miles from where she was born in Araby, Georgia. She lived for 93 years and attended that church for most of her youth.
Even under the best of conditions, life in South Georgia during the depression was difficult, and as the daughter of a sharecropper, getting enough to eat was not something that happened every day. Her mother died when Katie was about five years old, and she and her younger brother were sent to live with her uncle's family, which lived a few miles away. Katie's financial situation remained bleak because her uncle was also a sharecropper. Even at a very young age, she had to work in the fields picking cotton and helping with whatever work was done around the farm. So, needless to say, attending school was based not on educational needs, but on how many helping hands could be spared at the farm.
One day in her late teens, at the tail end of World War II, Katie met a dashing young private in the Army Air Corps and shortly thereafter became an Army wife. It was life-changing for them both, but financially, there wasn't much difference between a sharecropper and a private in the Army.
Even in 1947, when the Army Air Corps became the United States Air Force, military pay was low, and living conditions were difficult because American taxpayers wanted to forget about the war and the men and women who fought in it.
So Katie's life as an Air Force wife was one of taking care of my sister and me with little money and very little help, as my dad was on flying status and was sent TDY for weeks at a time to every hotspot and brushfire war around the world.
This continued until my dad retired at Homestead Air Force Base in South Florida, and things got somewhat better. They were finally able to buy their first home in Miami because they could now live in one place for more than a year or two at a time.
There's more to my mom's life, but this post is getting way too long.
Mom passed away from heart failure while sitting in her easy chair in the living room of her own home. She passed quickly and peacefully, which is the best any of us can hope for. She always wanted to be remembered as a mother, wife, and a sharecropper’s daughter... nothing more, nothing less.
Theboondork
The Air Force Academy. Some of the finest young men and women in the country are trained to be United States Air Force officers at this Academy in Colorado Springs.
Flower garden in the Bass Pro Shop parking lot, where I spent the night.
In the foreground, you can see the Air Force Academy football stadium, home of the Air Force Falcons. In the middle ground, you can see the dead brown trees killed in the last forest fire I had to evacuate from. And in the background is Pike's Peak
This is the airplane in which the Air Force Academy cadets get their first taste of "Hitting the silk." Everyone has to be trained to use a parachute, and you can see that the door the cadets jump out of is still open.
When I woke up the next morning, there were 12 RVs in the Bass Pro parking lot with me.