HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY...(and grandmother and great grandmother....)

When my uncle Fred died a couple of years ago I took the opportunity to take pictures of photos
that were in an album made by a cousin. The page above shows my maternal grandmother and
grandfather. Ida Belle and Laurence Frederick Catton. He went off to fight in WWI already
carrying a bullet in his shoulder from shooting practise.
When he returned from the war they were very poor and sadly he died just
when my grandmother had given birth to their fourth child.
In spite of great poverty my grandmother raised four children single-handedly and
lived to be almost 94 years old. 

Ida's mother, Lydia Jane, is shown above. She had good genes as well and lived
to be 104 outliving a couple of husbands.
She was very feisty despite losing her sight as she aged. No one
could tell her what she could or couldn't do.
I like to think that in addition to receiving her middle name that I also inherited
her feistiness. 

My mother, Edith Jane, was very photogenic! This is the house she lived in as a girl. A well-to-do uncle
owned the house and allowed her, her mother and three brothers to live there. Those were the depression
years and money was scarce as were jobs.

I have a Brownie camera though not the same one my mother used for a lot of these photos. She
loved to pose and get her photo taken - I love this one with the old bike and newspaper-sized basket.

I see myself in this photo.
 

This is the house I grew up in.
Me and my mom.  She was a great mom - always had good advice when I had a problem. In the 1990's she
was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, late onset. It wasn't long before dementia took her away from us in 2000, almost
20 years ago. But she is as alive to me now as she ever was and I feel her presence every day.

Here we all are...my two older sisters, my two older brothers and my handsome parents. This house didn't
have a furnace only an oil stove in the dining room to heat both floors. The girls' room had a wooden vent in the floor to allow heat to rise (not much haha! The linoleum was bitterly cold on the feet winter mornings!)
Eventually my dad excavated underneath the house raising it up and creating a basement.

Here's my mom and I in my dad's garden - he had quite the green thumb.

Mom - I'll keep cycling just like you did. One of these days
we'll meet up on the same road.
Love you Ma.