Skip to main content

A Woman's Place is in the Wild

 I learned a lot from my mom and my grandma. My mom ran a successful business, raised three kids, had a 51 year old marriage before she passed away. And every night without fail, she made a home cooked meal for her family. She’s also the one who helped me find frogs, taught me how to gently hold a baby turtle, and calmly helped me look for a snake that had escaped from the jar and was slithering


around our house. 

 

When I’d walk down the street and visit my grandma, she’d stop ironing my grandpa's shirts, or cleaning floors or baking homemade brownies. And she’d take me in the woods and exclaim how each wild flower was more beautiful than the next. 

 

I’m hoping I’ve passed down some good ingredients on how to be a balanced woman in today’s world to my three daughters. Maybe I wasn’t the one who taught our three how to cook or how to iron. But as they are finding their places in the world, I know one place they’ll always feel at home…thanks to the moms of our life, my mother, grandmother, and mother earth,  “A woman’s place is in the wild.” 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Good Thing?

  When I was a little girl, my mom and dad shared their appreciation for bluebirds with us. My dad put bluebird houses up in our yard, hoping to attract them. My mom needlepointed sayings with bluebirds on, and found small glass sculptures of the tiny birds to place around our house.   I think for them, those “bluebirds of happiness” truly did represent the peace and joy that was within the walls of our home.  When I grew up and moved to eventually land  in the house I now live in, I tried desperately to attract bluebirds. Put out houses. Bought a whistle. Bluebird food.  But…never one.  But over the past few years, with my mom passed and my dad declining, I would awaken many mornings to a soft hammering on my house. At the highest point on one corner of the outside in the cedar siding, a woodpecker was diligently creating a hole. Each time I’d see him working his way through the side of my house, I’d wonder how I was going to deal with this issue, for surely a hole made by a bird in o

Forget-Me-Not

  Back in the day… Before cell phones Before land lines were obsolete Before my mom died, She and I had a late-night code: one of us would call the other and let it ring only once (so as not to wake everyone as all the phones in the house would ring) when we had something to talk about.  The other would know to return the call. No matter what hour of the night.  We would’ve already spoken that day, and we were living only a few houses apart from each other so there’s a good chance we had visited too, but those late night calls-when the world settled down to stillness and silence…we would share what only mothers and daughters share.  It was such a simple gesture, those calls.  I probably took it for granted-the fact that my mom was just one ring away.  But those moments became some of my favorite memories.  My mom is gone now but still, I leave my cell phone ringer on at night.  I say it’s for emergencies  but I think equally so it’s for the non-emergencies-when one of my daughters feel

Teachers

  I remember the huge auditorium I sat in, on a fall afternoon at UW Madison. It was the introduction to student teaching. The professor stood  in front of the room full of college kids eager to have our “first classroom.” He said, “If you aren’t asleep by  8 pm  each night because the day of teaching has exhausted you, you are doing something wrong.”  I distinctly remember shaking my head and laughing to myself saying, “there’s no way…”  I made it through seven years of teaching elementary students before I became a mom. I taught in what would be considered for many reasons, a non-challenging district. During those teaching years,  I made it to  7 pm  on good nights before falling asleep exhausted.  Fast forward to now. I’m no longer in the classroom. But some of my most favorite people are-my daughter, sister-in-law, and friends teach young ones in the classroom. I hear some of the stories-the above and beyond that teachers must do these days to help these young kids learn, immersed