(image credit: www.annapolisrivercampground.ca)I won't have my beautiful mother with me for long. She is having health issues -- and it is my feeling that she will pass on very soon. It is my hope it will not be for a year or more, but I must accept that it will be soon.
She is not my birth mother. But she is my mother. She is from Bridgetown, Nova Scotia. So I thought, tonight, I'd remember her hometown just a bit.
Bridgetown is about 7 miles from the Bay of Fundy, a wonderful, clean expanse of coast where you can breathe freely. People there -- according to my mom -- won't have much sympathy for you if you whine about how terrible life is. But if your house burns down, every neighbor within miles will have food, or clothes, or a place to stay, for you.
Mom worked her way through Acadia University in Halifax by waitressing in Maine summer resorts. She is proud that Acadia is still one of the premier colleges in Canada. Her graduating class had 15 members. Many have passed on, but several she still visits.
When Mom was young, Bridgetown had, maybe, 500 or so citizens.
She can remember amazing things, from those days. Classmate Wally had acne, and agonized over it. Laura beat the pants off her opponent in the Debate Club. (And Wally and Laura still correspond with her.)
Things like "you do what you have to do" were not an issue, for my Mom. During her college years, she had two dresses and three changes of underwear. Period. You really DID do what you had to do.
I have been to my mom's childhood home. It is a quiet place. Owned by someone else, of course, but thankfully, sill rural, still clean.
I am thankful I can make the connections between herself and myself. I feel no such connection with my birth mother ... but mothers are mothers, and my magnificent, Nova Scotia born, wonderful mother, is everything to me.
Thus this tangent tonight :)
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