Happy Mother's Day, Mama!

And have a happy day, everyone else, too.

I am cooking up a nice arroz con pollo in honor of my mother's Mother's Day...Where am I cooking it? In the garage, of course.  I still have the electric skillet in there so it's the logical place. The new kitchen is too nice to cook in.

Anyway, I have been thinking about my mama today, as everyone else in the US is thinking about theirs.  She was, as I've stated here, the most remarkable person.  I was just in the bathroom looking for some nail polish remover to clean the label glue off the new oven window (why do they put that stuff on there?) and I noted how many boxes and trays of misc. make up items I have sitting around there.

My mama had one of those old fashioned dressing tables with a long triple folding mirror in the middle of it, and two small chests of drawers on either side...As long as I knew her and she had thta dresser, I knew what would be in her right hand drawer when I opened it.  In that dresser were one box of Coty's L'Origan  face powder, one velvet puff, and one Tangee natural lipstick.  Period.


She was beautiful but not vain. Or, more likely, had given up vanity long ago when she saw that beauty doesnt always play to the hand of the possessor.  She kept her hair permanented, which was too bad, because she had lustrous dark hair which would have been great these days in a long flowing mane. But that was not the way of her time and class.  She needed a quick, short, practical hairdo that could withstand a constantly blowing 30 or 40 MPH Gulf breeze whenever she was out of the house.

Or in it, for that matter. There was no A/C in the days of my entire childhood, and you had to keep those windows open and that crossdraft flowing in order to tolerate the extremely warm temperatures of Brownsville, Texas.  ("Not as bad as San Antonio by far!  And don't even mention Houston!")  So a short permanented hairdo was the answer for her and most of her cohorts.

Permanent or not, and just one lipstick and one box of face powder in your artillery, you were beautiful, Mama.  We, your daughters, 1-2-3-4-and 5==we'll never forget you as long as we live. Today, on your day, I'm out in the garage making a nice arroz con pollo in the electric frying pan in your memory. In your memory because I am thinking of you as I do it...Love,YAZZYBEL