EIGHTY-TWO

The Momma d’Elisson in 1943... not quite sixteen years old.

Today is my mother’s eighty-second birthday.

I’d have baked a cake, except for two reasons. First, Mom hasn’t walked the planet in over twenty-one years... and so a cake is not on her agenda these days. Nor is much of anything else.

Second, Mom never was much of a baker. She liked cake well enough, but I can only remember her baking one cake in the entire time she and I shared space on this Mortal Coil. Perhaps because it was such an unusual event, I can still remember exactly how that cake - a spice cake, of all things - smelled and tasted.

No, Mom would have been perfectly happy with store-bought cake. Her watchwords were, “Why do anything yourself if you can pay someone else whose job it is to do it?” Hilaire Belloc said it best:

Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light
Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.

[Which explains why I don’t do electricity or plumbing.]

Mom may be gone, but she lives on in her granddaughters. Both Elder Daughter and the Mistress of Sarcasm have inherited bits and pieces of her personality, her sense of humor, her intelligence and common sense, and even her looks...

     

I sure wish she could see them now. And, who knows? Maybe she can.