Lola

How I loved this fierce little woman, my mother

Lola on her wedding day.

If one woke really early in the morning you would find my mother with a Pall Mall cigarette in her mouth, coffee in hand, reading the Bible before anyone in the house woke up. She loved Goo Goo Clusters, and Rocky Road candy bars the best. She loved anything with sugar. She always had candy in the pockets of her coats. We accused her of having bacon inside her pant cuffs because every dog she met liked her a lot. She was the only one in the house to eat the fruitcake that lurked around the Christmas holidays. After her panty hose shredded she wore them under her pants instead of throwing them away. She recycled or saved everything, including bags of every sort. She had no tact. We chalked it up to her being an Aries. After a dinner of homemade ham and beans, she would eat leftover bean sandwiches with Miracle Whip … it kept the beans from rolling out of the sandwich. She was always there when I was babysitting, answering my calls about how to stop a baby crying or how to deal with two-year old temper tantrums. Her underwear were always in shreds, probably because she was pregnant for 15 years straight. I loved how much she loved her parents … both of them.

I loved how she could manage to light a cigarette despite the wind on the Montana plains. And I loved the day she came home laughing from the grocery store because she had walked out with both arms full of grocery bags, and some guy asked her for a light. She laughed and laughed when she told that story. I loved her blue Avon sample lipstick case and how she let all of us girls go through it and sample the colors. She loved it when we brushed hair. She let us curl her hair and put makeup on her, everything except mascara, it was too itchy. How she sent one of us to Marzetta’s corner store to buy 6 candy bars for a quarter. I always opted for sunflower seeds. I loved the fried corn meal mush left over from breakfast, when she cooked breakfast for dinner. How you could never find her in a store because she was so short. In later years, her cough was the reason we located her. I loved how she loved books, especially authors like Pearl S. Buck and those Readers Digest condensed books.

The tiny little woman with the big attitude. She was very specific about her height – “4’ 11 and ¾.” When we were sick, she nursed us back to health with warm Jello and hot lemonade. And the cool washcloth that she folded just so and placed on our foreheads. It instantly made you feel a little bit better. I loved how fast she walked in spite of her short legs. How much she loved Bingo and fishing and didn’t get to do either of them much. How she could calm a fussy baby really fast. She had seven gallons of milk delivered every Monday when there were three teenagers plus three more kids still at home. How she scraped off the burnt black stuff from toast, and rebuttered it so the bread wasn’t wasted. Her favorite flowers we lilacs, sweat peas and ugly, smelly marigolds. I loved how pretty her legs were. The scar on her cheek and the story of how the car hit her and knocked off her underwear when she was a little girl. How scary it was to hear her cry because you so rarely heard or saw her do it. I loved that she crumpled Kleenexes in the pockets of every coat she owned.

I loved that she had a crush on James Garner, and Mickey Rooney. How embarrassing she could be telling off store clerks or anyone else who made her mad. How almost nothing grossed her out whether it was ringing out diapers in the toilet or cutting up chicken. I loved what she called her “maybe” dinners – maybe it would be good and maybe not – she wasn’t making any promises. How afraid of spiders she was. How she would venture anything in the kitchen if she had a recipe. How she was afraid of mushrooms in a salad because they were raw. I loved how much she loved to dance. The look she would give you in church if you were talking or laughing hard enough to make the pew shake. How people on the street would make a beeline to talk to her because she always listened.

She was feisty and fierce, this little woman named Lola

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