Thanks Mom

Today is Mother’s Day, a day we dedicate to honoring our mothers, who dedicate themselves to our wellbeing all the rest of the year. My mom visits my brother and his family on this actual day, so the kids and I did our mommy visit yesterday.

Mom was a rock to us kids growing up. No matter how crazy things got in our chaotic world she was (and is) always calm and reasoned. Patient. And loving. Always loving, no matter how awful we were or are.

Mom taught me to cherish family first and to realize that who we are is built upon a foundation of who there was before us. She has always worked hard to keep us connected with extended family and to help us understand how who our ancestors were shaped who we are. (It is sometimes easier to accept personal quirkiness when you know that a hundred generations of Montgomerys before you were similarly and equally quirky and weird.)

Although when I was a kid genealogical research seemed to be a deadly boring pastime, reading journals that she discovered, visiting cemeteries where long ago relatives are buried and tracing the dedications on their weathered marble gravestones brought the past alive for me. When you contemplate the Civil War in terms of your own family fighting there, then coming home to try to salvage their family farms, it ceases to be an abstract history lesson and assumes a reality that a list of dead strangers cannot offer.

I have my mother to thank for that insight. In fact I always wondered what drew me so irresistibly to farming. I came right out of the box loving animals and the land and growing things, even though I was born in the city. All the close relations were railroad men or factory workers so where did the farmer gene come from? Thanks to Mom’s research we found legions of farmers just a couple of generations back. I guess I came by the addiction honestly.

I have to thank her as well for dragging us kids along wherever my father’s passion for knowledge took them, although at the time sitting in the station wagon waiting at yet another antique store seemed somewhat less than scintillating. Because she kept us with her, I love books and living with antiques, and understand the imprint of the Iroquois upon the region (from many hours of sitting at digs sifting red and blue trade beads and fragments of "worked" flint and hand made pottery out of rich black dirt). I have seen up close and personal the abundant minerals that are hidden in New York’s mountains and streambeds, and in fact collected the ones in the links. I know all about Scotland and have visited the land of our ancestors vicariously several times. (And despite early-life immersion I still like bagpipe music.)

I love you mom. Keep up the good work!