“I’ve got my ring now, Mom; I’m going out east to marry Harry.”
My eyes dropped. I couldn’t bear to look at her face. I knew what I would read there.
But Mom was not one to back off from a difficult situation. “I’m not surprised. When do you think you will be leaving?”
So it began…the process of pulling up roots and really leaving home forever. Of course there was excitement but this was tempered by the realization that I wouldn’t see my family for a while…maybe not for a long time. But I was going to see Harry. We had been apart for a year and I had missed him so much. Our story was the typical love story…good girl falls in love with the town bad boy…seeing only in each other the hopes and dreams that could be realized together.
Mom was practical as always. “Have you enough money to tide you over? Where will you stay initially? Where will you get a job? It’s a big city and you are a small town girl.”
The answers were easy as Harry’s landlady would put me up until I found a job and a place to stay. Then she asked me a question I hadn’t expected. “And what do you want to take with you, to remind you of home?”
“The photo of the cows and the blue sugar bowl,” I replied before I had even processed the question in my mind.
Mom shook her head. I always had been a bit of a mystery but she loved me.
So that’s what I took, besides my clothes and my Bible. The cows in the photo had been on my grandfather’s farm in England. It had been on the wall in the living room as long as I could remember and the blue sugar bowl I must have filled a trillion times. The cows reminded me of my heritage, the sugar bowl a memory of my years at home. The future I could not see but my ring was a promise for the future.
When it is time to take some life-changing turns in the road it is good to have a bit of heritage and good memories to guide you. They kind of give you a jumping off place. My grandfather had come to Canada with many hopes and dreams. My widowed mother had raised three girls. We had all survived. With that background and my Bible in my suitcase, I was ready and God would guide me.
Striking out on our own is hard on everyone and I still recall Mom’s tears as I said goodbye but that is what you raise your little ones to be…independent and able to handle life on their own…with helps of reminders of home …like a photo of some cows and a blue sugar bowl.
