Inspiration Rambling III : Momma

         When  I was a young man of nine, I was with my mom while she was picking raspberries. It was in the middle of the summer and was very hot.  I had become tired of helping (and was full of berries) and slumped into some shade. I quickly got tired of being there too and was tired of watching my mother hum and work. So I asked "MOM how can you work in this heaaaaaaaaaat?!!!!" She never looked away from her work and simple said something that certainly affected my life.

        "Because I'm not here," she said "I'm a beautiful princess, who's picking raspberries to feed her prince when he gets home from slaying the dragon" I thought about this a moment and thought she was crazy.

         Her craziness didn't end there, she was an unending workhouse of fantasy as she went about her  work as a mother. She had a pet spider that she had been watching all summer long while she was hanging the clothes on the line, weaving her own tale about what it's life was like. House work became a Cinderella story; her motto was "What an adventure!" and she constantly sang the words "There are bills to pay and worlds to conquer" As she woke us up in morning with her jingles. She could turn any bad experience into an adventure. One famous saying that my mother is notorious for is "Hit it with your imaginary frying pan" she even had a song for it.

 "So I took my imaginary frying pan and I hit it in the head, it was all in my imagination of course but to me the problem was dead!" 

       She was in plays, and sang, and problem solved and lived her life the best she could using the power of her imagination, she was also sensitive because of it.  I remember once during the 1990 war in Kuwait, my mother found out that a neighbor's son was sent to war, and had put a yellow ribbon around their tree. She cried for days, remembering her own brothers away during WWII, she wrote a patriotic song and delivered it in a card to the family.

      She had always encouraged me to use my imagination no matter what I was doing, and even though she never authored her own novel you could say that she's the author of my imagination. She planted it, made it fertile and gave it room to grow. And then suffered as I woke her up at 2:00 in the morning every morning to show her something I drew or wrote; come to think of it, she never told me to stop that practice or to go away, she always looked, then asked me about it the next morning.

Thanks Momma!