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Everything seemed to come easy for my mother while I was growing up. She was known for her gourmet cooking; especially her Japanese cooking. Dad was in the Army and being a Japanese interpreter, had a couple tours stationed in Japan. While in Japan, Mom was always busy taking Japanese cooking classes, flower arranging classes, silk painting classes, or wandering the streets in Tokyo for fabric to design suits for her and my father. Yes, she was a seamstress and a tailor too. Everyone was in awe of mom. If I was lucky, I would be able to talk her into taking me with her to one of these classes. She usually left me with the maid, Matsukawa San, who loved me like her own. In 1958 I was only about seven years old when she took me to her flower arranging class in Tokyo. I was dressed in my red cotton shorts and striped shirt, with blond braids going in two different directions (you see I was quite a tomboy), sitting next to this beautiful red headed woman in a tight gray pencil skirt, with a form fiting sweater cinched in at the waist with a gold leather belt, gold cuffed bracelet, red lipstick and high heeled sandals. The Japanese ladies and men thought mom was a movie star. She was beautiful. Her skin was porcelain white with freckles. Her eyes were a beautiful hazel, her hair a deep auburn red and styled in the latest style. She was 5' 4' and weighed 115 lbs. with a 23" waist. Her back was always straight and her legs were shapely as she walked with one foot directly in front of another (she always told my sister and me this was the way ladies walked). We moved back to the states when I was ten and mom continued to amaze dad, me, my three other siblings along with the rest of the world with all her super abilities, gifts, and talents for many more years. In the year 2000 my father passed away. My mother and father loved each other very much and the shock of losing dad caused mother to have a series of small strokes that brought on a type of dementia that has Alzheimer's like symptoms. We watched her slowly lose each one of her abilities and gifts and then her mind. Her sewing skills went first, then her art and cooking. As her skills disappeared I started becoming more involved in cooking and in art. She and I would spend the day together trying out new recipes; she would give me advice and I would do the labor. I even started a full time art business so mom could watch me work in the studio and be around creative things. I would have her sort items, like buttons and untangle trim, to help her feel involved. The last year and a half she was alive she wasn't able to do anything. Her mind was no longer hers. She died February 2010. It was so hard to watch our mother disappear…and I would wonder where she, the mother I knew, went. But as the months have gone by and after much thought, I know where she went. She is in us; her family she left behind. She has passed on her flower arranging and art skills to me and my son, her cooking and sewing skills to my sister in law, sweetness and sensitivity to my brother and her love of storytelling to my sister. Thank you mom. You will always be with us.
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