my Mom as a boy, picking absolute beauties for my Uncle Claude in Ware Shoals so he’d get the ice cream churn moving for fresh, homemade, ice-cold peachy, creamy deliciousness.
Every kitchen in every house – from cousins to aunts and uncles and even neighbors and friends – all smelled like bacon, grits, eggs and biscuits all day. No wonder I was a fat kid!
Somehow, my Mom lost her accent at some point in Baltimore while her sister lived in Delaware for more than a half-century and still sounds like a Southern belle more than 93 years later.
My mom had wonderful subtleties and dark complexities. She was very easy to please in some ways. As skinny as she was, she loved to eat so that always worked. Her appetite even two weeks ago was quite eager. When she ordered the crepes for breakfast, she ate ALL of the crepes. Even her roommate at Future Care North Point was amazed that a woman who weighed 62 pounds when she entered a senior facility could eat that much. “She eats more than anyone I’ve ever seen,” her sweet 85-year old roomie Micky tattled on her.
Two weeks into her stay there, she wound up having an all-night stomach episode. She admitted that the food was so good that she didn’t want to stop eating. “You get mashed potatoes with every meal,” she proclaimed.
She was from a time when you ate all of the food on your plate. At her new home at Future Care, the food was good, bountiful and plentiful. I think she thought she was on a cruise ship the last six weeks of her life! She was pretty comfortable there when her lungs were doing well and loved the way her nurses helped her. Plus, the Orioles were always on at nights, too. And we made sure that family was there every day at some point to make her not feel isolated.
As much as my Pop and I connected through sports and reading, my Mom was more likely to be a television watcher of the local teams when I was a kid, more so than getting on the bus for games with us. She usually did a handful of Orioles games a year with
