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"Can She Bake a Cherry Pie, Billy Boy?"

© Joan Archer

My mother was not the typical type of mom that you read about or hear about in the general media. Probably suffering from a protracted depression or some other "illness", she was often doing things that to others seemed probably pretty strange, not at all the things a "girl" should be doing. From what I understand, she was like that all of her life.

For example, she didn't like to do housework, so she simply quit doing it when I was still a small girl. Yes, it was sometimes difficult growing up in that unclean environment, but I loved my family, so it didn't matter all that much. As for hot meals, let's just say I was the school cafeterias' biggest fan. We (my brothers and I) used to tease my mom, and call the oven "the incinerator" and the microwave "the autoclave". I had food poisoning twice while growing up. I once heard an actress on television say that she and her brothers learned to cook out of self-defense, and I dearly understood what exactly she meant by that. My brothers and I, as well.

Her niece has recently told me that when my mom was young, she would start doing the dishes promptly after dinner. She would run the water, soak the dishes, and find something picayune to work on, such as ripping a label off a jar. This label-tearing would go on for about two hours (on one jar!) until my Grandma would just tell her to go to bed. I don't know if it was as much "madness" as it was "a method to her madness" but I do know now where Jasper gets it. Isn't it funny, things are easier to deal with if we think they're simply inherited.

One major thing my mom was good at (besides thinking so much like a kid that kids adored her) was fixing things. She was not afraid to tackle anything, from auto mechanics to plumbing. She was a good fixer, too, able to rig things together so that you didn't need to get someone else in to really fix the problem. When she fixed it, it stayed fixed.

Most of her skills came about from being a farm girl. She grew up in an atmosphere of people doing for themselves, no matter what gender they were. If you were the one who could fix the problem, then you did. It was as simple as that. I was fortunate, in that she saw fit to teach me most of the basic repairing skills I would need to get by in life.

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