Anniversary sparks many thoughts and memories

I knew a woman born at home in Minnesota on a hot September day — record breaking hot — back in 1922. The house with the big front porch sat on Oak Street in a pretty little town. It wasn’t screened. She told me later that was her idea of luxury — a screened-in porch.

When she was in first grade, she played a nurse in a school play. Her mother sewed the outfit, cutting the red cross for the hat from a tomato soup can label. Only 7, she decided she was going to grow up and wear that uniform. And she did — graduating from Swedish Hospital School of Nursing in Minneapolis in 1945.

Hard times hit in the Great Depression years. She went door to door selling her mother’s cookies. Her Norwegian family didn’t ever throw much for a party, but one year she got a Baby Ruth candy bar for her birthday.

By the time she was a teen she was a University of Minnesota football fan. So big into it she’d draw the field on paper and move the ball up and down the yard lines with her pencil while she listened to the game on the radio.

Later, on her own pursuit, she took up golf. But if it was basketball or baseball or football she had the game on her television. She taught herself to play the piano — and pounded out the old hymns while singing the lyrics in her beautiful soprano. She thought she’d go overseas as a medical missionary and took training at Simpson Bible College in Seattle. Instead she married and worked in hospitals stateside.

In the late 1940s, her dad left her mother. She was so mad she didn’t invite him to her wedding in 1950. She went years without speaking to him — until he was dying, and then she made it up with him.

Her philosophy on children, even before conversation about world population, was you just replace yourselves. So she had two — a son and a daughter. I am that daughter. And on this day I write it is five years since she, Ruth, spoke her last words to me. A faint “I love you.” Two weeks earlier she’d said, “There comes a time when the journey’s done and you need to let it go.” And she faced with determination, like she’d done everything, her final days.

She cautioned me ahead, “Don’t hold me back.” She knew where she was going and Who would be waiting. When the moment came that she left me behind I could only whisper in wonder, “She’s there. She’s there.”

That doesn’t stop me from wishing I could drive into Priest River and knock on her door—see her through the small pane of glass sitting in her blue chair. Watching the game, of course.