When my mom turned 17 in 1952, my grandparents decided it was time for her to leave home. They signed her up for business school and dropped her off at the local Greyhound bus station. Overnight, her world changed from the rural Comanche family farm where she had grown up to the big city of things she had never experienced before.
Ethnic foods were new to her; she quickly fell in love with the first Chinese, Mexican, Italian, and Armenian food she had ever tasted. After nine months of attending business college, she had mastered typing, shorthand, and the Dictaphone. But she had never wanted to be a secretary in the first place.
She was working in a high rise building with offices on the upper levels and a movie theater on the lowest level. Movies were new to her, so she went during her lunch hour and watched the first half of a movie for fifty cents, then had to wait until the next day to see the ending during her lunch hour for another fifty cents. She will never forget her wonder at seeing “Valley of the Kings,” “Three Coins in the Fountain,” and “Roman Holiday” for the first time.
It took a year for her to save up enough to attend Oklahoma City University where she studied to become a teacher. Her next job was at a drop-in preschool where moms could leave their children anytime. She and Mrs. Goforth were the only workers caring for 30 to 75 children every day, depending on how many moms went out shopping.
At 22, she answered the call for more teachers in California and moved 1,500 miles across country by Greyhound bus, bringing only her suitcase.
I’ll never forget how she shocked me one night at age 53 when she walked into the living room modeling the first bathing suit she had ever worn in her life. She had always been a strictly “dresses only” mom. She had quit her job and started a whole new career working with severely handicapped children, so she needed a suit for going into the swimming pool with them.
Eighteen years later, she still works everyday with children the rest of us would rather not think about. Because she has been able to coax children to eat whom even nutritionists have given up on, including some who are tube-fed, she is known as “Blender Woman.” She can whip up a tailor-made concoction to tempt even the most finicky eater.
To those who need her, even those who can’t see or hear her, her touch conveys love. To those who need her, her work is a lifesaver. To her, she’s just doing what she’s meant to do.
My fondest times with her are the times we’ve spent together discovering plants and gardens. We’ve gone to breathe in the fragrances and colors of rose gardens, orchid shows, and fuschia displays. She got into trouble at the gorgeous Filoli Estate Gardens in Woodside for trying to get as close as she could to the largest magnolia tree we’d ever seen in our lives. She was on tiptoe bending a huge blossom down to sniff when the estate guard began calling to her to move away from the tree.
The Western Garden Book is my mother’s dictionary. All my life, she has passed along so much of her wisdom through growing and nurturing.
Annie Woods describes it best: “My mother’s garden is the whole Earth, contained in the heart of a tree. Within this sacred space my roots join the roots of every growing thing, my arms and fingers stretch to reach the moon, the leaves are talismans, and sap runs warm as blood. In my mother’s garden I sit among the trees until I become her: roots in the earth, branches opened to infinity. I listen closely to her heartbeat – and I hear my own.”
