Mothers day +4

I will try hard to finish the remarkable life of Mama, Mable Robinson Stroud. She will probably creep into most of what I write about myself, because she was the single best influence. She was modest, wanted me to always be proper. I am sure she had few reasons to enjoy my presence when I was a child. She had learned ways to preserve food for the winter. She wanted to be able to can beans and corn, but did not understand that low acid foods needed higher temperatures than she could provide; even if she wrapped the jars in worn old work clothes aand boiled them in the big wash pot all day, they still spoiled. Tomatoes and peaches, with high acid would be preserved. It was a great day when she was able to buy a pressure cooker. With it she could can meats, stews and even seafood. The stove she had cooked with for many years used kerosene, which was a grade above the old wood stove she used in my childhood which required her to get up an hour before anyone else just to heat it up enough to bake biscuits.

We were living in Swansboro, I had just started in my first job after graduating from college, and with my first paycheck I bought her a gas stove. It used a butane tank in the yard. It did not have a disagreeable smell like the kerosene. She became an expert with the pressure cooker, even made fruit cakes in it.

I cannot say Mama loved to cook. It was always a chore, but she was very resourceful. She made the best fried chicken in the world. Often in summer we had it for breakfast with corn and ripe tomatoes in vinegar. We looked forward to Christmas when she would cook all the good things she could, chicken salad for sandwiches, a ham, several kinds of pie, from pecan on down to sweet potato. On Christmas day we did not cook, only ate, all day long, any time we chose. Before she got a refrigerator, after I left home, she could only make jello in winter when she set it on the back porch to jell. Her jello had fruit cocktail, coconut and nuts in it, with just enough jello to stick it together.

She loved flowers, saved seeds for the next year, fertilized with barnyard manure, hen house droppings and even went into the woods to dig up "woods mold " or rotted leaves to enrich the soil. She could have written a book about home remedies. I wore a mustard plaster to school for a cough, The kids could smell it and laughed at me. The strangest thing I ever wore was a little cloth bag containing wood lice to cure a sore throat hanging from a string around my neck.

She was very superstitous. Bad luck would surely follow sweeping a room after sundown, so if it became necessary to sweep, she swept it behind the door, and waited until the next day to get it up. Washing bed linens between Christmas day and "Old Christmas", which was 12 days later,was bad luck. We were told to be especially clean during that time, as we were used to fresh sheets every Monday night. She was very clean, insisting on washing each of us when we were small before we could go to bed. I have the little three legged skillet she heated the water in the fireplace for our baths. The wash cloth was wet, soaped and returned for rinsing, with the face first and on down as far as possible, After we were old enough to do it ourselves she supervised our washing "possible" in private. She always said, "You might not always have clean clothes to put on, but you can have a clean body.

We all knew how much the church meant to Mama, although she didn't talk about it, She would not ever criticize my dad, even if the missionaries came by when he was sitting in the front room with his friends playing poker and drinking beer. I was in college before we ever had a room just for sitting, My parents always slept in the the front room. I shared a room with my brothers until I was 16.

My dad loved to travel and several times they drove to Utah to see us. When we had been married 13 years was the last time she was able to travel that far in a car. Her arthritis, coupled with a knee injury a year later, when a train hit their car, made it difficult for her to travel.

When they arrived, Mama was so excited. She could hardly wait to tell me that since he did not like to drive on freeways that he had taken her suggestion to drive through Carthage and Nauvoo, IL. At the Carthage jail was a missionary couple The little wife took my dad's hands in hers and asked."Are you a member of the Church, Sir?"

Daddy replied,"No, but my wife is."

She asked. "But you know it's true don't you?"

To which he answered, "Yes, Mam." Then she asked him to promise her that as soon as he got home he would call the missionaries and tell them he was ready to be baptized, and he told her he would. Mama said she would not remind him, just wait to see if he really meant it.

Mama flew out to see us several times, once to spend several weeks and have cataracts removed.
She was excited to go to the first assembly at BYU in the fall. Ted pushed her wheel chair right to the front and she was able to shake President Harold B. Lee's hand, and hear him speak. The next time she was to see him was on the other side. They died within a week of each other.

She was only 62. We did not know the cause of her death, even with an autopsy, but it showed a diseased gall bladder, which we now know can cause failure of any organ. Her kidneys ceased to function after many weeks of terrible pain. I flew to Florida at Thanksgiving to be with her in the hospital. They were worried about ecoli in the blood stream which they did not understand, but never suspected the gall bladder.

A beautiful woman, a life that was a benefit to all who knew her. I still cry sometimes when I think of how I miss her, and hope that she was proud of me.