Important Days in February

Good morning!

Our nation celebrates (not very seriously) two important dates in February. Abraham Lincoln's birthday is today, the 12th.  George Washington's is the 22nd.
Cars and furniture are put on sale at reduced prices. When we were in school, those days were flurries of activity centering on stovepipe hats, cherry trees, hatchets, big skirts and powdered wigs.  (Note which president made a bigger impression on me.)

There is another date that is more important than any other in February, though celebrated by even fewer people. Yesterday was the anniversary of my mother's birthday.  It slipped by this blog because I was thinking in the moment, rather than taking note of the date. 

Linda Proctor Temple was born on February 11, 1904.  That date was fixed in our brains during childhood, and it had an incomparable aura.  That was the birthday of OUR MOTHER.  I was born when she was twenty-five years old, so I can remember her as a young woman.  I do not remember thinking of her as beautiful when I was a child, but beautiful she was. In a culture in which beauty in women and money-making ability in men are the two crowning talents, she was up there with the best of them.

Mother was born in El Paso, Texas.  It happened this way.  Her parents had been living in Temple, Texas, until their older child, a son, developed such bad bronchitis that the doctor suggested that they move to a more arid climate. Doctors actually did that, in those days.  No pills available for most things.  So, they packed up and went out to El Paso for a few years.  My uncle's bronchitis did indeed go away and his state of health improve, and when they went back to Temple they were four instead of three. 

My mother was named Linda, for a deceased Aunt Belinda, and Proctor for her Maine-born grandmother's family.  Another family name from that area (Orono) is Brown.  Down that line came her level-headedness, perhaps.  The Temples were a fine farming family in Tennessee who had to struggle after the War and moved en masse to Central Texas to retrench. My own grandfather went into the mercantile business and there they lived until they again  de-camped en masse and came down to the Lower Rio Grande when it opened up to American farms and stores in the twenties.  I say, to American farms and stores instead of Mexican ranches and stores, but it was all one big (uneasy, sometimes) amalgam when I was growing up.

My mother taught school for a while, but meeting my dad changed her course  and she became a housewife and mother in South Texas, basically for the rest of her life.  True to my father's promise, she nearly always had a maid in the house, which was good, for it allowed her almost fanatical neatness to flourish.  Her method of keeping things under control was to throw things out. Almost nothing was of enough sentimental value to keep.  A child's treasured piece of metallic paper couldn't make it from morning till school lunch even though I had hidden  it under a sofa cushion to try to save it.  She did hang onto a few books, but nothing was ever saved "just in case." So her house was orderly as well as immaculate.  When it was my mother AND my grandmother going at it, you practically had to hang onto the bedpost to keep from going out with the trash.

I have talked enough (for now) about my mother's cooking, but there are lots of other topics about feminine virtures--keeping her kids looking good under very straitened circumstances, for example.  I remember how she used to say that my and my sisters' hair shone like silk under the Texas sun.  People were constantly remarking on it.She washed it every week with Kirk's Hardwater Coco Soap and gave it a vinegar rinse. My grandmother sewed most of our clothes, because my mother was too impatient to sew.

Her friends were a large group of valiant ladies who coped with absolutely terrible climate issues: dust, heat, wind, to keep really lovely homes and take really good care of their families.  It is a quality to be admired, my young feminine friends.  In the meantime, they had some really good times.  Card parties, almost every afternoon for some (not my mother), shopping even with a limited budget, coffees in the morning and meriendas in the afternoon. (Merienda is the best although you can gain more weight by having meriendas than you can imagine. What's merienda, you ask? More later!)  Sporting types golfed, and, if not golf-incined, hung around the nineteenth hole.  My mother had little time for any of those daytime activities.  But, when my father was not working in Mexico or California, they either went out or had people in for cards every evening.  My father was a sociable person and loved company.  Mother was lucky to have her parents there so she could go out with impunity. She wouldn't have entrusted us to the maid.

Mother loved the movies. In those very poor depression years when all you might afford was a ten-cent movie, she'd often take me along when my father was out of town. I loved the movies. They formed a great part of my slangy in-family vocabulary. "Fork over the dough," some crook said at some point in a movie, and it became part of me.  My mother did not take part in the  hilarity, however, and kept her original self wherever she went. The people she identified with were those beautiful, charming socialites who frequented so many  movies we saw: Myrna Loy, Melvin Douglas, Franchot Tone, et al.  I admired the women's clothes and wanted to be a dress-designer.  I don't know if mother came away from those movies more dissatisfied with her life or not.  The truth is that it was education she wanted, whether she knew it or not.  She was awfully smart and talented and had to pursue her life on a smaller canvas than she might have.

When she was a teen-ager in Central Texas, and as beautiful as you can imagine with patent-leather black hair, ivory skin, brown eyes and a perfect figure, an entrepreneur came into town and wanted to take my mother away to Hollywood to make a professional Spanish dancer of her.  Of course her family said NO.  They were wise.  But, say, she had somehow escaped the surly bonds of Texas to go--somewhere else, where a larger life could get a look at her--that bundle of brains, beauty, talent.  Would her life have been bigger? Better?  We cannot possibly say. We loved her so much.  We were glad she stayed, and let  us come along. YAZZYBEL