We laid Mama to rest in the little graveyard on the prairie. The farmhouse where she was born and raised was just a short ways up the dirt road. The house is gone now but if you stand just right and look through the trees you can almost see where it stood.

Mama and her sisters used to walk by the cemetery and smell the fragrance on the air from all the flowers. She said it was like a garden.

Later on she taught second grade in a little 2-room schoolhouse further down the road. This was back during the war years. Something I just learned last week was that one of my cousins was in her class in that little schoolhouse. I am going to steal the story he told me.

It seems that he had a schoolboy crush on his teacher. He thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

One day when they were outside playing at recess a car pulled up and a tall lanky man in a soldier’s uniform got out of the car. His teacher went running toward the soldier and threw her arms around him. This made him really jealous.

Of course that soldier was my Dad returning home from the war. Mom and Dad were together for 60 years after that and it took his death to separate them. Somewhere now they are together once again.