My beautiful Mom is 90!!!

“The beauty of a woman is not in a facial mole,but true beauty in a Woman is reflected in her soul. It is the caring that she lovingly gives, the passion that she knows.

And the beauty of a woman, with passing years only grows.” 

― Audrey Hepburn

Luella Mary Kendall - Lorne F. LeMieux

August 31, 1943

Today, my beloved mother celebrates her 90th birthday and I'm so incredibly happy to have her with us still. I remember a psychic once telling her she'd live to be 92 and that upset her...she didn't want to live that long, she said. But here she is - still in relatively good health, enduring the aches and pains of later years with barely a complaint, still driving occasionally, cooking, and working daily on the computer to complete the most expansive family tree you could imagine!

For all the poetry I've written, including pieces about my children, my spouse, friends, my siblings...I've never written one about my mother. I just never could find the words to express everything I feel for her - not just boundless love and affection, but admiration, respect and sometimes a tiny bit of envy, if you must know. She is, as you can see, a beautiful woman, and she honestly has only grown more beautiful with age.  Her hair is pure silver, like her dad's, and naturally so - no tints or toners. Her eyes are still a rich dark brown and are alight with the contentment she has always expressed at being exactly who she wanted to be her entire life - wife, mother, homemaker. And that last...home-maker...that is exactly who and what she is. 

She made our home home - not just comfortable and welcoming but a place where love was made visible in every little touch...in her knitting, the small personal collectibles that were scattered throughout the house, the books -leather bound and gold embossed - that are everywhere and for which she personally made the decorative bookshelves that hold them. She laid the floors, (seriously - pegged pine floors), she laid the stones for the fireplace, the stairway, the living room wall. Every inch of this house, which now belongs to me, speaks her name and holds the precious memories of all our times together. 

Her friends think that there is no one in the world like her - and they'd be right. There isn't. I have always said that my mother was the perfect "lady." She never raises her voice, is never ever vulgar, wouldn't swear if her life depended on it, doesn't whistle (not ladylike), and every single morning of her life, she dresses as if someone special is coming to visit - including jewelry - some necklace or broach that is special to her, a gift from her Dad or my Dad or one of us children. She's never owned a pair of jeans and wouldn't be caught dead in them! 

When I was in high school the boy I was madly in love with (and truly I was and stayed in love with him until after he died in an automobile accident on his way to ask my Dad if he could marry me)...that boy/man used to tease me and say he loved me because he adored my mother and the old saying was if you want to know what your wife will be like, just look at her mother. She adored him right back - they had art and music in common and he would come and visit with her often while I was away at college. That's where my touch of envy came in - I sometimes thought he really would have preferred my mother had he been older! 

Sadly, I am not like my mother though all my life I aspired to be as wonderful a person as she is. She was the center of my father's world until the day he died - I don't think he even realized any other woman existed. Oddly, in a way, that is true for my brothers as well - they adore her and everything we all do is somehow measured against whether Mom would like it or be upset by it. 

I dedicated my second book of poetry to my mother with these words:

"To my mother, Luella Kendall LeMieux, whose indefatigable spirit has been my guiding light and whose encouragement and faith in me has made all things possible."

I might add that her personal sense of integrity has been a model for me my entire life and in that respect, at least, I hope I begin to measure up to the woman who is still and will always be the heart of my home and the most beautiful person I know. 

We've stretched the celebrations over a three week period so as not to overtire her and there's still more to come. Just another day, she's says..."Don't make such a fuss!" If we could, we'd give you the moon - just as Dad always tried to do.  Happy birthday Mom - I hope we're both around for your 100th! I love you very much. 

Here's your favorite poem from my book, Mom, that you made me read aloud every time someone came to visit...

The Road of Infinite Grace

I met a man today,

just an ordinary man,

who taught me more about love

in one brief encounter,

about the infinite grace of loving,

than I have learned in a lifetime

of trying, or crying,

or praying or saying it aloud.

His old pickup was stopped

on the side of a country road

so I pulled over to see

if he needed assistance,

if something was wrong,

if he needed a lift.

Just a little elderly man

standing in an untended field and

as I approached I saw him

bend low to pick a flower or two,

some Queen Anne’s lace,

a handful of daisies, some buttercups,

cornflowers and purple spikes

whose name I didn’t know.

“I’m fine,” he said, “but

that was kind of you to stop.

I’m just picking a bouquet, you see -

today is my 60^th anniversary. 

My wife had a stroke two weeks ago

so I’m on my way to spend the day

at the hospital with her.

She always loved wildflowers best,

not fancy garden flowers,

they suited her, you see,

for she was just like them.

Her eyes are blue as cornflowers,

her cheeks as rosy as these mallows,

her hair had the glow of buttercups

when we used to walk this field

together hand in hand.

She can’t speak right now

to tell me that she loves me still,

but she tells me with her eyes

that she’s never wavered all these years.”

Unashamedly, I wept to see

the bouquet he held in his gnarled hand

and offered water to keep them fresh

till he could bring them safe to her.

“Don’t cry, my dear, it’s nothing much.

She’s graced my life for sixty years,

each day of them a blessing -

I just hope she’ll know that in my heart

she’ll always be my buttercup.”

       

          © Lianne Schneider 2010

This is the song my mother had played and sung at her wedding, at my Dad's funeral and has asked for her own. I hope it's a very long time before I have to find someone to sing it! 

Celebrating the many rites of spring...

Life stands before me like an eternal spring

with new and brilliant clothes

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Deep Purple

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/deep-purple-lianne-schneider.html

This year, everywhere you turn, people seem to be celebrating spring more joyously than I can ever remember. Perhaps it’s only because it’s been such a very long, cold, snowy winter for most of us here in the northern and western hemisphere. The threat of one last bit of snow and ice is potentially still out there as the temperatures seesaw from 30s to 70s in a matter of hours all across the country. So our spring celebrations are doubly meaningful for many of us this year. But celebrating spring has had and still has great religious significance around the world as well – because spring is about rebirth, being “saved” from the dead of winter, triumphing over death, enslavement and evil and being renewed.

Sometimes we can be very myopic about our own particular celebrations, assuming that they are the most important or most meaningful. As a Christian, I celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus at Easter – as do Christians around the world. There is no more powerful symbol of renewal, salvation or triumph for Christians of any denomination than Resurrection or Easter. But Christians are not alone and not the first to welcome spring, to recall events of salvation or triumph over “the enemy” – whether that enemy is a brutal winter or an evil person.

While it is unlikely that you will find cards to celebrate many of these rites if you go looking for one in a Hallmark store, you will find cards wishing our Jewish friends a happy holiday about the same time of the year as Christians are celebrating Holy Week. That’s because in the Jewish faith, the Feast of Pesach or Passover is celebrated in the spring to commemorate the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, the triumph over both Pharaoh and the hardships of the desert crossing. It’s an eight day celebration of freedom and the promise of new life and it begins with a Seder meal that includes unleavened bread and bitter herbs – symbols of how quickly the Israelites had to gather their few things and leave Egypt. The events celebrated during Passover are the heart and soul, the most sacred memories of the Jewish people, just as the events of Holy Week and Easter are for Christians. Jesus, of course, celebrated Passover.

Here are a number of other religious and non-religious rites and celebrations held around the world at some point between early March and May 1. That’s not a coincidence – any more than the timing of our Easter celebration is.

The symbols we attach to Easter may (even the name and the Easter egg and Easter rabbit) – and probably do – derive from spring festivals in certain Middle Eastern Mystery religions like Zoroastrianism or Mithraism. But if we look further afield – beyond the Middle East, we can see other traditions with similar or related meanings, all having to do with renewal and rebirth in some way.

Japanese Buddhists celebrate a spring festival called Ohigan – which literally means “the other shore gathering” but it is a celebration to honor ancestors and to express gratitude for enlightenment or awakening, a celebration of the birth of Buddha and wisdom itself. Those Japanese who practice the indigenous Shinto religion – an earth based religion – celebrate the spring equinox, praying to the spirits of nature…of the forest, the mountains, the rivers, the sun and the sea…to purify the land, to renew it.

In India, Hindus celebrate Holi, the festival of colors which marks the coming of spring and the new harvest of winter crops. Part of the celebration includes huge bonfires that are lit to cleanse the air of evil and symbolize the destruction of Holika, for whom the festival is named. The ashes from the fires are applied to the foreheads and some ash taken home to put on children’s foreheads to protect them against evil.

Wiccans – another earth and moon based religion – celebrate Ostara or the vernal equinox marking the first day of spring and the renewed life that comes with spring. This day has marked special celebrations in ancient cultures too – to honor Aphrodite, Hathor, and Ostara.

The Baha’i New Year is celebrated each year beginning at sundown on March 20. It is preceded by a 19 day period of fasting symbolizing the sparseness of winter or the less-fruitful growing seasons. But new growth begins with the coming of spring. The period of fasting is similar to the Christian practice of Lenten fasting and sacrifice. One month later, those of the Baha’i faith will celebrate the first day of Ridvan which marks the day when Baha'u'llah proclaimed his mission as the last of the prophets of God.

The spring celebrations conclude with the Wiccan celebration of Beltane on May 1 of each year. It’s a fire festival that represents the coming of summer and the fertility of the season. This late spring Celtic festival is closely tied to the farming calendar with prayers for a fruitful harvest.

So as you can see, Christians are hardly alone in celebrating rites of rebirth, renewal and salvation. Mankind has always been closely bound to the seasons of the year, the cycles of growth and harvest, and to the idea of “resurrection” whether of the physical body or of the spirit or the bursting forth of seeds and flowers to mark the triumph of life over death.

And so I wish you each according to your beliefs…a happy Easter, Passover, Ohigan, Ridvan, or Beltane. Respecting such traditions from all over the world reminds us once again that we are more alike than different and certainly more connected that we often realize.