Because I Forgot to Send a Card

When I was at the Natural History Museum the other day, I read something about moraines in the section on meteors (I really mostly try to avoid reading when I'm in museums as it speeds up the process of me getting tired). Coming across the word, "moraine" took me back to my home schooling days and our Bob Jones history text (all I could remember while I was at the museum is that moraines are formed by glaciers). And it reminded me of how many of the things that I know were taught to me by my mother.

My mother, as many of you know, is quite a lady: more intensely hard working than almost anyone else I know (I suppose that her siblings rival her in this--and it sure is a characteristic that I wish that I'd inherited). She's incredibly generous, especially with her cooking, which is inevitably delicious (there are rumors from the early days of her marriage to my father of a couple of dishes that she got wrong, but that is ancient history). And her primary concern in life is with her family--she's such a mother (even now, as she and my father are empty nesters, she has found a little boy to teach at home). This, of course, means that when she visits Stearns and I in DC, she mostly ends up scrubbing our kitchen floor. And it means that she has spent more hours listening to me talk than anyone else in the world (which alone merits like 18 awards!).

Happy birthday, Mom!


(picture, picture)