My Mother Made Life Fun

My mother made life fun. We didn’t have a lot of money, but wherever we lived it was a place of enchantment. My earliest memory is of a smooth shiny floor in a narrow room. I was a very young child and my siblings and I took turns sliding across it on socks. Sometimes we’d take a towel, lay on it and ride it like a sleigh. It was a typical cleaning day, and after Mother had waxed the long, narrow living room floor, we helped her polish it by sliding across it. It was characteristic of Mother that she made a chore fun for us to share in and made our simple life amusing.

Our home in Monroe, Utah

 Mother made chores entertaining and work engaging, even in my earliest memories. There are photos of us in the front yard of the house in Monroe, Utah where we lived when I was three years old—with a big garden next door, with friends and relatives nearby.  I remember helping in the house and in the garden, but I don’t remember it being work.

 I do remember the house—the big living room, with the kitchen in the other end of the house. Next to the kitchen were stairs leading down to a dark, earthen-floored cellar which terrified me. I remember the rectangular hanging fluorescent light in the stairwell leading down to the fruit cellar—it reeked of a butcher’s store, a laboratory, or some clinical, unsafe inhospitable utilitarian place—not a portion of someone’s house. I’m sure Mother must have told stories about the fruit cellar to keep me out of it and those stories made the cellar such a scary place, just as her games made the living room a fun place.

Our yard with garden, me 2nd from right in front

My parent’s room led off the back of the kitchen, but I have no idea where my older brothers’ room was. My room was a tiny alcove off the living room with sunlight waking me up and mother’s bedtime stories wrapping me up in comfort. I remember setting the table, cleaning up after dinner, taking out trash, making my bed, all the common childhood chores, but they were done with Mother, singing and laughing. She made life fun, telling stories of her working during the depression, racing her sisters to the end of the row of crops they were weeding or picking.

Another memory of the living room in that house is of it darkened, and quiet. My brothers and I had measles and we were kept all together in that room so Mother could nurse us together. The windows were draped to protect our eyes and noise was shut out so it wouldn’t hurt our ears. I can’t remember how long we were sick, but I remember being excited to be included with my brothers instead of being kept apart as a younger sister. I must have not have been too sick, because I recall Mother having a difficult time keeping me still. I didn’t want to lie in bed. I wanted to do things, to play with my toys, but Mother insisted I couldn’t; I must lie still like my brothers.

My oldest brother was especially sick; I know he lost his hearing in one ear. I don’t think my other brother being harmed as much by the measles, but I doubt he was such a trial to mother as I was as an active three-year-old. There was not much you could do for measles in 1947 except isolate them and encourage them to rest, although most were probably so sick they probably just wanted to sleep.

Finally I remember Mother came up with a plan to entertain me; she decided to paint a picture of me. So I tried to hold still while she painted my portrait and told me stories. She only had a piece of particle board to paint on, but she painted me as long as I could keep quiet. Finally we got well and got on with our lives.

Years later I found that old scrap of a painting. It had never been finished, but was just a face painted on part of an uneven board. But as I looked at the toddler in the painting, I realized Mother had not painted me with the measles that I had suffered with. She had refused to scar my face with them, but painted me as she wanted to see me— happy and free from illness. She captured me as an eternally happy child in a home where we shined floors by sliding on them, and listened to stories that took the pain away.