Mother's Day - For One More Day

What would I give for one more day or even one more hour with Momma?  Pretty much anything.  I'd love to be able to sit and laugh with her over the silliest of things -

Momma had a heart for her children; nothing was too great a sacrifice for her kids and grandkids.  She loved us so much that, at times, I still don't think we realize how much.  She loved spending time with us and always had a memory to share.

We laughed over the unusual way I got around as a baby; she even shared it when our church had a graduation celebration during my senior year of high school.  I didn't crawl; I would sit down on my bottom, grab my feet, and bounce.  She's told me dozens of times about how I was running through the house and tripped on the threshold, crashing into an end table and gashing just below my eyebrow.  She cleaned me up and put a butterfly bandage on it because she didn't want me to have a scar from stitches.  More likely, she didn't want to have to bribe me with a new Barbie to keep me from having a hysterical fit if she took me to the doctor.  Then there's the story about my older sisters and brother fabricating a story about living in a two-story house.  Momma was a single mother in the 1950s; Bubba was her right hand and was often in charge of "the girls."  When Momma was at work, they weren't allowed to have company inside.  They told a neighbor girl that their single-story house had an upstairs.  Naturally, she wanted to see inside, and they had the perfect excuse not to let her in, "Momma's not home."  They would go inside and stomp around like they were going upstairs.

When we got the new carpet, all our furniture was out on the lawn; Momma and her youngest grandson, Brian, lay on the floor and rolled all over the house on the new carpet.  Later that same day, I caught her and Daddy kissing in the closet under the stairs.  She shooed me away.

She was often called "Nurse Grandma" because she was always caring for our bumps and bruises.  She would wait until a grandchild was sleeping and then carefully remove stitches.  She could cure anything with peroxide, carbolated Vaseline, Baby Percy medicine if you were human, or egg and milk if it was an animal.

She had a white Persian cat named Pitty-Pat with one green eye and one blue eye. The cat was my oldest sister Linda's cat, but right after she got the cat, she left for college.  That cat lived to be 22, probably because she fed her buttered biscuits, which she would sit up and beg for.  When she was a young girl, she had a wolf.  She rescued three orphaned baby squirrels one time and built them a cage in our backyard; we had them for years,

Mother was so loving, kind, and patient until she wasn't.  One time that comes to mind is the case of a half-wild cat.  Momma had been catching wild cats and having them "fixed." this one old momma had a litter before Momma caught her, and so the fun began trying to trap her and her wild babies.  She finally managed to and was dipping them for fleas.  One in particular was not having any part of this and had managed to stay just out of reach.  Finally, hot and dripping with flea solution and just a little irritated, Momma grabs the cat by the tail, snatches it up by the scruff of the neck, and "baptizes" it.  She pitched it down, saying, "Well, now we know why God gave them handles."  I couldn't stop laughing.