Family Reunion

I got back Saturday from the Moulton family reunion in the Black Hills. I got reaquainted with many of my relatives I haven't seen in over 10 years and I met new ones. It was a lot of fun seeing all of them again. We had relatives fly in from Florida, Michigan, Virginia, New Mexico, Colorado, North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and possibly more states were represented.

I did however, not get a chance to catch up with my aunt and uncle, Ethel and Dutch's families. I talked to a few, but just never got a chance to catch up to them. I wish I would have gotten there on Wednesday. Maybe then I would have had more time to spend getting to know them also.

One of my mom's cousins had some old slides from her mother that she got put on a disc. We all got a copy. They were pictures of the Moulton family when my great aunts and uncles and grandparents were young. My mom was in a lot of them. They were from when she was probably about 13.

I finally looked at those pictures today, and I cried(yes, Janel. I know I made fun of you for doing the same thing!). My mom was a very expressive person. You could always tell a lot about her feelings on something by the way she looked or smiled. In these pictures, you could tell my mom was a handful and very much full of life. As I was looking at them, all I could think of was how she would never had dreamed how her life would end. In the pictures from when she was just a kid of maybe 5 with her cute curly hair and mischivous smile, you would never think someone could die the way she did. She never knew the heartache she would later face with the death of her own parents and relatives or the hardships of marrying a hard-headed man or struggling to raise a family on one income while trying to run the farm. All of this was running through my head as I was watching her and some of my closest relatives in pictures, flashing across my computer screen.

Then I stopped and realized how much my mother had. She experienced the birth of her 5 children and raised them to be law abiding, resourceful, respectful individuals, and parents. She was able to see 3 of her grandchildren come to life and she helped them grow spiritually as well as mentally. She was a well respected person. She would help out anyone in need. She gave love freely not just to her family, but to those she took care of and her friends and coworkers. Even though she died an untimely, tragic death, my mother left a legacy that is hard for anyone else to live up to. My mother set the bar high for us. Each of five kids are a part of her and she lives in us. She lives in us when we show love and compassion to those around us. She lives in us when we chose to do the right things, but also when we make mistakes and learn from them. I am my mother. She taught me everything she knew about life, it's struggles, how to love and show compassion, and taught me to be myself. I don't think she'll ever know how grateful I am to have had her as my mother and I hope some day I can be the person she was inside.