flower girl

my first husband liked country music and used to drive up to Bakersfield to commune with the Johnny Otis clan frequently.
on one of those trips, many years ago, he drove me and my daughter to visit my mother who lived there then.

my mother now has dementia and is in her 90s. my father,deceased, always used to call her his "flower girl"..he was the Principal of Punahoe School (the school that Obama attended in Hawaii) after the War...but, restless, my father took our family back to the states in the early 1950s and our brush with Obama never materialized. he met my mother the first year that she taught in the one room schoolhouse in Coopersburg, Pa. He married her and ended her one year old teaching career. Her father, Charlie, had a patch of land out behind the garage where he grew corn, tomatoes, strawberries, potatoes, apples, sour cherries, peaches and more. He worked at Bethlehem Steel and prided himself on his loyalty to his boss. He even crossed the union picket lines to go to work. He was a fierce individualist that instinctively distrusted groups - like the union. I admired my Popop but we had some fiercesome arguments about everything from capital punishment to the old testament. Before his steelworker job he was a farmer who fed half the town during the depression of 1929. Charlie's wife, my grandmother, Hattie, was illiterate, she signed an "X" for her name, when needed, but she was a great cook, taking the apples, peaches and cherries and turning them into heavenly pies and tarts. The generosity of my Nana and Popop was legendary. Sharing their crops with townsfolk, setting a place of honor at the dinner table for the handyman that fixed their roof, they were admirable people, however much I may differ with their politics. My mother was a farmer's daughter who won a scholarship to Moravian women's college. She lived at home until she married my Dad.
when i visited mother last, we wheeled her out to the lobby of her nursing home
and she looked around at the burgundy and green flowered drapes and said
"are we in Hawaii?....are these people from our house?"she gestured at the visitors passing by..."i think those girls," she leaned in conspiratorially, " live in my house..... are you going to take me home with you now? "