A Piece of my Mind: Things My Mother Said to Me (Los Altos Town Crier – April 5, 2017)
“Anything worth doing is worth doing well.”
But also: [Of a small tear or a crooked seam on a dress]. “It’ll never show on a galloping horse”
“What did Thumper say?” [It was actually Thumper’s mother in “Bambi” who said “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”]
“ If you ever say that word again I’m going to wash your mouth out with soap!”
“I grew up in a house with no men -my widowed grandmother, my widowed Aunt Em and her daughter, my divorced mother, and me. When I got married I didn’t know anything. I used to go in and watch your father shave. It was thrilling!”
“Aunt Em always said: ‘Never ask a question that can be answered by a number.’”
“My grandmother and my Aunt Em had always done all the cooking. I barely knew how to boil water. Your father had to teach me how to cook. “
“Everything I knew about being married I learned from the “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” articles in the Ladies’ Home Journal. Everything your father knew about being married he learned from the Boy Scout Handbook. Somehow we did all right.”
“Your father would take any job offer as an opportunity. I never had any security – never! until I got my first teaching job. Mac never said no to an offer; I never said no to him – I was such a doormat.”
[On the age gap between my younger siblings and me]” We had our family all set. One boy, one girl. Then we moved to East Texas and there wasn’t much else to do.”
“It’s not so much whether your child is ready to do something; it’s whether you’re ready to let him.”
“I didn’t care so much about being the first to do something. But I wanted to be the best. Well, actually, I liked being first too.”
“One of the worst things about being a widow is that you are not #1 with anyone anymore.”
“If you’re going to be famous, Allyson, don’t wait until it’s too late for me to enjoy it.”
[About the visions which began appearing after cataract surgery] “I know they’re not real, but they’re a lot more interesting than my reality these days.”
“Mac [dead 20 years earlier] comes and stands by the bed at night, but he never says anything to me. Do you think he is angry with me?”
“Promise you won’t give up on me, Allyson.”
[As I was helping her walk from her chair in my living room to the dining room table] “They didn’t tell me it would be so long. “
Me, thinking she meant the distance to her dinner: “It’s the same distance it’s always been.”
Mom: “No, I meant old age.”
[While living at her home of 60 years with 24/7 care] “Shouldn’t there be a pill I could take now to get all this over with?”
[Near the end of her life and memory] “I was looking forward to moving, but I can’t decide between moving in with Aunt Em or with Mother.”
“Are you a patient here too, or are you one of the staff?”
“Am I going home tonight?”
My mother died in her own bed a week later. 
Having figured out the advantage of attracting tourists to their market on Saturday morning, the city fathers of Sarlat have lost no time in figuring out ways to keep those walking cash dispensers in town as long as possible. On the Saturday of our stay we were tempted back onto the streets long after the market closed with 
At about the halfway point of our first day of hiking (9km) we felt raindrops. Drizzle turned to gentle rain, enough to rate dragging out our rain gear – all except DB, who had left her poncho behind to save weight. (DB has some curvature of the spine and her backpack is not very comfortable, so she chose to leave some basic stuff, including sufficient water. Fortunately both W and I tend to err in the opposite direction, and were able to keep her hydrated with our extra bottles, and fairly dry with my little polka-dot umbrella.). The ponchos added an unnecessary extra layer of warmth, so we kept trying to do without every time we felt the rain slacken, and then had to re-don when we got out of the sheltering woods or the rain renewed its attack.
We oohed and ached over a chateau whose ruined towers loomed above the woods on the left (it was burned by the Nazis in WWII) and exclaimed over weird fungi growing on logs and near the edges of the path. We noted pear orchards, apple trees heavy with fruit, an occasional vineyard lush with grapes awaiting harvest. We sampled wild blackberries at the side of the road, and tried to open chestnut husks to get at the chestnuts inside. (Chestnuts are stickery!” And we were counting down the remaining KM by tenths.
We were dropped off in Roufillac after a brief orientation on French hiking route markings, and told to “go between the houses and up the path”. Packs on back, hiking sticks in hand, we set off. The sky was partly cloudy, the temperature was in the low 70s, couldn’t have been nicer for our purposes. We wound up through wooded hills past houses and barns built of glowing yellow sandstone, some with tile roofs, many with stone roofs. We came to a small village perched at the top of the hill and realized we had climbed quite far, and there was a ruined castle inviting us to explore just at the tip of the cliff overlooking the valley.
We have a French road map courtesy of AAA.
We have a GPS which came with our car.
My husband treasures a diaper pin. For those of you born in the era of Pampers and Velcro, a diaper pin is a very sturdy type of safety pin, but with a plastic head covering the fastener. The point of the pin is guarded in a G-shaped cavity, making it almost impossible for tiny hands to accidentally open the pin and get scratched. The head of this particular diaper pin is made of blue plastic in the shape of a duck, with a cheery red beak. It was part of a flock of pink, yellow, white, and blue ducky diaper pins (twelve to a card!) used in the care and maintenance of our two sons, now grown and gone. My husband uses it to secure his sun visor to his belt loop or back pack when we are hiking or touristing.
Allyson Johnson 