Living a life well-loved
Seven years since she “flew away” as the song goes. My mother would have been 99 on September 15. I find myself wishing I could pick out a birthday card and shop for a gift. I did plenty of that when I had the chance — no regrets there. We were a duo for 62 years.
Ruth Helene Lokkesmoe was born in a two story frame house with a wide front porch on Oak Street in Red Wing, Minnesota — Norwegian to the tips of her toes. I learned of the record breaking heat that fall of 1922 when I moved to Minnesota completely unexpectedly years later — an hour down the road from Red Wing — and saw it broadcast on one of those then-and-now weather reports. I hope my grandmother had a fan.
I was always a little sorry I wasn't my mom's peer — for more time with her and to wonder if we might have been girlfriends. She the quiet serious type, yet with a witty streak — me talkative and enthusiastic — but enough alike that I would have joined her on the steps of Jefferson elementary school to play jacks. Or trekked the long distance to the swimming pool at Colvill Park, and wished passing the bakery on the way home we had a few pennies to buy one of those delicious smells.
No question we would have met up in the public library. She was a regular. Your classic nose-in-a-book — but, unlike me, responsible to get her work done first. All that reading made her a good speller, and a stickler for grammar. She was correcting my grammar almost to her last breath, and that's no exaggeration.
I seriously doubt I would have listened to the Joe Louis fights on the radio with her. I'm still bemused over that startling revelation. But I might have tagged along on the trip down to the funeral parlor to see if a “scandalous woman” — her story quite a stir in town — looked the same as any other deceased person.
Definitely I would have been that young adult friend who called to her at night crossing the tangle of railroad tracks when she didn't notice a train shifting — who turned her away just in time.
One thing she did not lend me was her lovely soprano voice or her piano playing, or any gift with music. I'm sorry I wasn't there when she and her mother cruised the halls of the hospital on a Sunday afternoon singing comfort to the patients.
From the second grade when she donned a nurse uniform in a school play a determined young girl knew she would grow up to wear one for real. It's not surprising that she did. What astonishes me in today's world is that she was eventually the night nurse at Newport Hospital, with an assistant — and they were it for whatever came through the unlocked doors until the on-call doctor got there.
If we'd been childhood friends I think I'd have persuaded my mom to be more outdoorsy. She later golfed and walked mornings, and we camped as a family — but she preferred indoors with her books or whatever sports were playing on television.
Her most beloved book was the Bible, and she knew it from cover to cover. It got her through the Depression — selling her mother's cookies door-to-door, and her brother being at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed (he survived), and breast cancer, and widowhood. And it got her through dying — with grace and peace.
One of my last acts when she lay still in her hospital bed — the funeral home van on its way — was to press a lipstick kiss on her forehead. I wanted someone to see and know my mother, Ruth Helene — born on Oak Street — was loved.