All About My Mother

Barbara, mid-1990s.

My mother Barbara died two years ago — on April 8th, 2017. By the measure of the world, she lived a small life. She died twenty miles away from where she was born and she was unknown outside the small circle of her friends and family. But I believe (along with George Eliot, whom I quote here) that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life.” Things are not so ill with me; things are great with me, in fact, and I owe much of that to the lucky circumstance that I had one parent — my mother — who lived her whole life quietly and purposefully focused on doing a thing she did best: being a mother.

She was born in southern Colorado, the second of three girls, in the early 1930s. The Great Depression was fully underway; the family was poor but getting by. Her mother’s people were Colorado pioneers, having settled in the San Luis Valley in the 1880s. They were farmers at first, tradespeople thereafter. Her father Fred was a recent arrival from western Kentucky. He had been raised on the myths of the American West and came to Colorado to experience them as a young man. As the Depression deepened, he found no work, and his dream of being a carefree cowboy was soon pretty well shattered by his being the father of two infant girls. He imagined that he could…