Mother's Day

(For politics, please scroll down)

Happy Mother's Day, Mom and Wawa.  I miss you both every day.

Family photos below....

Unfortunately, I don't have any photographs of the women on my father's side, probably because they came from the Church of the Brethren.  I do, however, have quite a few photos of the women on my mother's side.

Mom's grandmother, aka "Ma" (circa 1860-circa 1945), whom I never met.  She gave life birth to five sons and two daughters:

Mom's mother, whom my and subsequent generations called "Wawa"(1898-1981). Wawa was a mathematical and computer genius, with only an 8th grade education back in the hills of East Tennessee; she was a master seamstress, as well.  After she no longer care-gave Ma, Wawa went to Washington, D.C., for employment toward the end of World War 2.  Because of her intuition about how to keep those big-frame computers running as efficiently as possible, IBM trained her—never mind her age.  A redhead, she was a force to be reckoned with everywhere she went. Example: Wawa held off the power company at rifle point in Northern Virginia because the power company wanted to put high-tension power lines over her cow barn. Because of what we today call bad optics, the lines got moved elsewhere!

Mom (1916-1987). She went to Washington, D.C., to get a job during the Great Depression. A whiz at mathematics, she took various accounting courses and became a statistician for the federal government. She loved her job at the Federal Trade Commission, but kept getting bumped back to the Internal Revenue Service, a place that she hated to work. She met Dad on December 24, 1950, when she was thirty-four, and fell in love with him at first sight. Mom was never in good health during my lifetime; she had serious heart and kidney problems, and had a series of eight heart attacks between 1960-1964. Mom was the most patient person I've ever known! The photo below was taken a few years before Mom met Dad:

Four generations on Mother's Day, circa 1979. Left to right: my dearest cousin, the daughter of Mom's brother's son (1942-1992), at age 12; yours truly at age 27; Mom at age 63; Wawa at age 81.  This photo was taken in the living room of my maternal family's last "homeplace," which I sold in 2021: 

PS: I still have that loveseat and that side table!