Mother's Day

The memory is fuzzy, but I do believe that back in the old days, you wore a red flower on Mother's Day to church if your mother was alive and a white one if your mother was gone.

I am not sure what my mom did for herself since her mother died when I was two, but my very frugal mom was fortunate in that she didn't have to buy her children the red flowers because we had a red rose bush right next to our driveway.

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When my children were little, we had no nursery at our church. A number of us decided to furnish one of the meeting rooms as a nursery, and our first fund-raiser was fittingly on Mother's Day.

On that Mother's Day we moms were out in a strawberry patch at dawn and picked for two hours. We arrived just at the end the first service all dirty and wet, from the dew and later sweat, with the berries; and we set up stations at the exits. Our price was just a little higher than what we had checked at the grocery stores the day before (after all, it was a fundraiser), but that didn't stop one woman coming right up in my face and proclaiming loud enough so that all around her could hear: "You can get these at xxx store for fifty cents less!" She was so proud of herself, and all I could do was nod, because she just didn't get IT. Sometimes you just have to let the penny-pinching go.