Mom's Birthday

Today is my mother's birthday.  As is our custom, I lit a memory candle that will go all day today. (You can get them in the Jewish section of your grocery store.)  Mom was a wonderful model of how to live, particularly as she aged.  Having to leave her home in Florida and move into assisted living here in Johnson City was difficult for her, but she had an incredibly positive attitude about it.  She said that it was going to be like going back to college.  She would have her own room, but she could go to the cafeteria and be with other people as much as she wanted.  She played the organ for church services at the center, even giving an organ concert for a large roomful of people, took a sign language course, and actively participated in the activities at her local Lutheran church.  All this when she was in her late 80's. Luckily, her very sharp mind was never affected by age.  I was tickled by her incredulity when the center gave everyone a large button calculator.  She said, "Why would I use that?  I can do the math faster in my head than I can punch in those numbers!"  When she noticed the square root sign on the calculator, she turned it into a game.  She would say a square root and check herself on the calculator.

Mom had a most remarkable life.  She was the only one in her family to graduate from high school and go on to college.  Her father was against it, wanting her to marry a German farmer, like him.  When she insisted on going to high school, he sent her first to a boarding school.  That was too expensive to suit him, so he allowed her to finish at the local high school.  There was no school bus, so her father gave her a couple of driving lessons and let her drive to school from then on. This was in the 1920's, something almost unheard of then.  After high school, she insisted on going to college.  Her father acquiesced, only if she paid him back every penny he spent on her education, which she did.  (He had plenty of money, being an industrious and thrifty German immigrant.) After graduating from Wartburg College with an Associate's Degree, she taught at a one-room school, living at home and paying back her debts to her dad until she married my father, whom she had met at Wartburg.  I've told the story of their marriage in a previous post.

I have many other Mom stories, but I will save those for another time.

I have many pictures of Mom, but they are in boxes and albums somewhere in our basement.  I will share a few that I have files for.

Grauerholz family in front of home in Athol, Kansas
Mom is the little girl standing on the chair.

This is the glamour picture my father took with him
 to seminary before they were married.
She is probably about 20 here.

Another pic of her in her 20's
with the flapper hair style