Happy Mother's Day!

Mother’s Day is this coming Sunday, in case you were not aware! It is a bit hard to ignore this day as advertisements for flowers and chocolates and gardening items have flooded the ads the past few weeks. I think it is a perfectly lovely holiday despite all the commercialism.

Mother’s Day comes with a host of memories from my own mom. We bought sweet little mugs for her coffee for a dollar down at the neighborhood drugstore. We made breakfast leaving the kitchen in complete disarray but weren’t we proud of the pancakes on the tray to be delivered for breakfast in bed? The six Saylor kids never failed our mom on that day!

My own kids were lovely too. Although they had some challenges to deal with as they prepared pancakes on the wood cook stove! They picked violets and dandelions for my bouquets, and what mother doesn’t tear up thinking of those early days with young children. Sometimes they brought home cards with handprints and little notes attached. Oftentimes they came home with little marigold plants in paper cups. I have all of those cards in a trunk upstairs in a spare bedroom. I thank all teachers for doing that even though those cards still make me cry when I open the trunk.

With older children and those who live distances away, it is harder. Two of my sons, Abe and Adam, live in Charleston and in St. Pete. It is my middle child, by three minutes, who lives here. Aaron is the one I want to talk about today. Usually, I talk about all three of them in a conversation because it is hard to just talk about one, but today is different.

Aaron with his wife, Rachel, and their boys, Graham and Jonah, have built a wonderful life together. Recently they moved to a small farm on the edge of Fremont complete with fields and a pond for fishing and kayaking. Aaron loves the outdoors. In high school he won a statewide contest for naming all the trees in the state. He was a ten year 4-H member and went to college to study to be a naturalist and a teacher.

One of my favorite school stories about Aaron happened when he was in the first grade. Lucky for us his teacher was the lovely Rita Deller. She had all my boys in school. One early day in May Aaron announced to me that he was quitting school. He told me he had already learned to read and write and was needed home on the farm. I really wasn’t sure what to do about that, so I called Rita. I told her about the situation and asked her advice. She was a very wise teacher and knew just what to do.

The next day was Monday and Aaron bravely told her that he was quitting school because he was needed on the farm. She calmly and quietly took him aside and talked to him. She told him how much she would miss him and who would be able to teach the class about butterflies or birds or insects if he left the classroom. After he thought about it, he decided to stay to help her teach the other students. She was so wise. Aaron graduated from college, and I thank Rita Deller to this day for her kind and small counseling.

Aaron is known in our area as a class-act metal detector. If you lose a ring or other important piece of jewelry, it is Aaron who is called to find it at the bottom of Lake James. He will find it for you. Rachel often jokes about writing a book called “The Metal Detector’s Wife.” Aaron knows where the fish are biting in every lake (but he won’t tell), he knows where the mushrooms grow, which owl is in the distance. He has hunted in Alaska (now there is a great story), collected moths with his brothers in Honduras, Costa Rica and other countries of which I never even know about. The summer after his first teaching year in St. Pete he left a note for the family, “Going to Alaska, see you in September.” He drove straight through, slept in a tent all summer, and caught fish to pay his bills.

For Mother’s Day, he brings me a bouquet of lilacs from the farm and a load of compost for my garden.

These are my sweet stories, what are yours?

Happy Mother’s Day.