Thank you for sharing your mother's letter, Jerry. Her story brought back some of my own childhood memories, although in some ways I grew up in a more modern world. We had electricity and indoor plumbing, cars and washing machines. But I remember vividly hanging laundry to dry, and learning to sew on my Mom's old Singer, which was a treadle machine that had been converted with a small motor. It sewed one size stitch, forward. If you wanted to sew back, you turned the garment around. Buttons, hems and detail work were all done by hand.

We always had a garden, and fruit trees: apple,pear and cherry. I loved picking the ripe tomatoes and string beans, but I hated weeding, and we would spend hours in the nearby blackberry patch, picking buckets of berries that ended up as jam, shortcake or pies. We lived at the edge of town, so we had space for a big garden, and my Mom had a lovely bed of roses beside the house. Dad would buy her bushes for their anniversary and her bithday. I can smell them now, along with the lilac and honeysuckle; the scents of our childhood summer evenings, playing tag and red rover in the dusk.

Carly