A mother remembered

My mother would have been 100 on April 1. No one ever for­got her birth­day — the only ben­e­fit of being born on April Fools’ Day.

She was no fool though. At least I never thought so. Her own mother did at times. As a young girl she would ride her pony, which she kept in a garage behind her West Broad Street hill­top home in Colum­bus, over to the 5th Avenue quarry, hitch him to a tree and swim all day in that deep, dark pit that hor­ri­fied my grand­mother. Some­times she even took her pony in with her!

She also rode Bill down Broad Street to the viaduct where the draft horses that pulled for Mur­ray City Coal and Ice were hosed down, just next door to the orig­i­nal Spaghetti Warehouse.

Because her step­fa­ther was a hunter, she agreed to ped­dle his kill — squir­rel, pheas­ant, rab­bit and quail. In the win­ter, off her pony-pulled sled she sold firewood.

To my grand­mother that kind of behav­ior — quarry div­ing, mix­ing it up with drovers and huck­ster­ing was fool­ish and unlady-like.

Oh, my mother was a lady, just a very adven­tur­ous one. Upon grad­u­at­ing from Offi­cers Train­ing School, she landed a sec­re­tar­ial job with John Han­cock Life Insur­ance beat­ing out 100 appli­cants. Then in the mid­dle of the Depres­sion, she quit her job and with a friend boarded a Grey­hound bus for Cal­i­for­nia. Dur­ing an early morn­ing swim off Catalina Island, she met a poet who later ded­i­cated a book of poetry to her.

She and her friend went to a dance that evening where a young man asked her to dance. He was hand­some and they both could fox­trot. He walked them back to their board­ing house where he asked my mother if she would join him for the week­end at some moun­tain retreat. She said no; he wrote his name on a slip of paper, “This won’t mean any­thing to you now, but it will some day.” She threw it away. He was John Glenn, the actor.

On her return to Colum­bus, she got her job back, met my father who could not dance but rode horses, and helped him build a suc­cess­ful busi­ness, accom­pa­ny­ing him on long and ardu­ous trips in a camper on the Al-Can High­way before it was sur­faced. She arranged flower-winning dis­plays at the Ohio State Fair, played the gui­tar and rode her bike to the swim­ming pool — a dis­play in those days no other mother did! In her purse she kept the address of a job open­ing at a dude ranch some­where in Wyoming for a cook in case of a real set back.

My mother had all the tal­ent in the fam­ily and she used it well, leav­ing in her 96 years to my brother and me great tastes for adven­ture and a fear­less trust that life is very good.

Sylvia Zim­mer­man is the owner of Ful­ton Creek Jer­sey Cheese in Rich­wood. She holds two grad­u­ate degrees and, when not work­ing on her farm or pur­su­ing her inter­est in sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture, writes her own blog.

Posted by Sylvia Zimmerman on May 10 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.