My mother grew up in a small wheat farming town in the middle of nowhere Kansas.
Her father was a World War I veteran and fought in the trenches of Germany and Belgium. He later came home and began working as an electrician, installing electric lights in most of the homes around the prairie farming community of Delphos, Kansas.
My mother’s mother was a vegetable gardener who grew more in her quarter-acre garden than you can find in the Meijer produce section.
Although my mother grew up as a country girl in a small town — with a town square complete with a statue of Abraham Lincoln and a gas co-op — she wasn’t afraid to look out at the big wonderful world beyond the banks of the muddy Solomon River and the grain elevators that marked the edge of paradise.
After high school she became a Jayhawk at the University of Kansas, where she got her teaching degree — her ticket out.
She left the rolling plains of the Midwest for the Navajo Indian reservations of New Mexico. She taught school to the young Shiprock Navajo children, most of whom either walked to school across the desert country or arrived in the back of old pickup trucks.
A few years later she fell in love with a handsome young electrical engineer who worked wherever his company sent him to build missile silos for the U.S. government during the early stages of the Cold War.
I showed up a few years later and lived in Wyoming, California, North Dakota, Arizona and finally Colorado, where Dad finally found a job building skyscrapers and public utility plants.
Mom, of course, came along for the ride, never working again after those few years of teaching Navajo children.
She taught me how to love the Denver Broncos even before the John Elway years — you know, the bad years.
She was a stay-at-home mom during the rise of the women’s liberation movement. I was 8 and loved flying kites, finding frogs and turtles and watching Saturday morning cartoons.
When I was 10 I convinced her to let me have a paper route. Most of the time until I was big enough to load up the 60 or so papers on my bike, she’d drive me around the neighborhood in our old brown Rambler.
We’d take that old Rambler on family vacations back to Kansas to see grandma, work in the garden and dig thistles out of grandma’s pasture land that she leased to a neighbor to run cattle on.
Forty acres of virgin Kansas prairie holds lots of thistles. It was usually a two-day job to cover all the ups, downs and cow ponds.
We’d take meat sandwiches, cantaloupe and a jug of ice water for a picnic in the tall grass and shade of the cottonwood trees.
The mosquitoes were always bad in August, but mom and grandma would work up a smudge fire to keep them away while we rested under the blue sky. We’d head back in the late afternoon and I’d help grandma snap beans or read old Pogo comic books that she kept in an upstairs cedar chest.
Grandma didn’t own a TV, so we’d entertain ourselves by playing outside games or chasing fireflies.
Grandma’s gone now, but mom’s still around. I don’t talk to her as much as I probably should. She sends letters and I enjoy reading them, but I don’t write back nearly as much as I should.
When I do, I try to tell her thank you for taking care of me and raising me right.
She taught me a lot of things, but mostly I think she taught me to enjoy life and find adventure wherever I am, even if it is in a small town somewhere in the Midwest.
David Kennard is the executive editor and publisher of the Troy Daily News. You can contact him at 440-5228 or send e-mail to editorial@tdnpublishing.com.
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