Mommy

[shatto]

The Women's Auxiliary Army Corps program was cancelled when she was in the middle of flight school so she had been transferred to the office of the Commander of Portland Army Air Base, when the fighter pilot walked through the door. "He was too aggressive and I should have known better" she told me, who was the result of that meeting in 1944.

Somewhere I have a faded photo of a woman, every bit as striking as Elizabeth Taylor, dressed in kaki and sitting on a boulder with a scope sighted 30-06 on her lap, on a rocky mountainside overlooking a distant valley on an Afghan Ibex hunt. To get there she had to outshoot the best shot of the Pashtun village far below because women simply didn't go hunting on their mountain.

Her heart always was at Cloudwalk, the small farm secluded in the Oak Tree covered hills of the Sonoma Valley where she raised and showed champion German Sheppard dogs. And three children.

The lion had walked up the dirt path, the night before, sniffed the man, woman and boy in sleeping bags on the ground and deciding they were of no interest meandered off into the Ethiopian bush. Later we learned that over three hundred people had been eaten by lions that year.

She met and married her soul mate, ironically another fighter pilot, who was one of the TWA contract pilots who help found Ethiopian Airlines and ultimately they moved to Saudi Arabia. She became an accomplished diver, the Red Sea becoming their haunt when he was not flying.
They retired to the Florida panhandle, bought and ran a sporting goods store until he passed away.

Her parents called. She returned to where the story began in Portland, Oregon and took care of her parents until they passed away. And she became my example and hero for her strength, fortitude and dedication.

Then she bought the motor home!

Last year she made it to New York for the graduation of the daughter of her adopted Ethiopian son with Batchelor and Masters Degrees in Engineering. And she met a clan of people who would not have existed were it not for her acceptance of her son's friend into the household. She got to see the how one small niceness can produce unexpected wonders.

And now, too late, I realize how little I know of this story.

The doctors, for a long time, thought it to be 'little old lady' acid reflux and loss of appetite....but it wasn't. It had wrapped itself around the esophagus and was gradually closing it off and by the time they found that out it was choking off the Aorta and rapidly spreading into the spine, it was too late.

She was taken to the home of her daughter in Apache Junction, Arizona where both of her daughters followed her example and cared for her until, with her beloved dogs on the bed at her side, my mommy died on Mothers Day.

[GasSavers_Erik]

I am very sorry to hear of your loss. She sounds like an amazing woman.

[GasSavers_JoeBob]

Wow...what a story.

Get together with your sisters...compare notes...they may be able to fill in some of the holes in your knowledge of your mother, and perhaps you may be able to return the favor, maybe knowing a few things they might not.