Tomorrow is my Mother's Birthday

February 12 is my mother's birthday. She never understood me, and didn't really like me but I know she loved me. The whole animal fixation was perplexing to her. She had a hard time with any pets in the house at all. The first cat I ever had, Ditty, named after Mrs. Vandetti, the school bus driver, ended up being given away after I didn't take care of the cat box properly. I lost my mother after a devastating stroke took away her speech and mobility. She lasted two years in a nursing home in Georgia before complications from diabetes killed her. I would have liked her to see my farm...even though she wouldn't have wanted to stay here more than one night I would think. Mom was born and raised in rural Georgia. Her folks were granted land by King George a hundred years before the Revolution. Other ancestors were granted land in Georgia for their service in the War for Independence. She's as American as any European American can be. She and her three brothers volunteered for service in WWII. Mom and her sister Lillian were Army nurses, the brothers joined the infantry and pounded the ground in the European and Pacific theaters. It was the Army that got her over the Georgia state line for the first time, but it was my father who got her over the Mason-Dixon line. They met at Fort McClellan in Alabama when mom was nursing the wounded. He was from a Swedish immigrant family in Brooklyn, New York, an officer himself, and incredibly handsome. He showed her five uncashed Army paychecks. They were married in Washington, D.C. and together they were shipped off to Germany where my father was assigned post Liberation. They lived in a castle which was divided up for officer's apartments and Willie and Freddie were born in the Munich Army hospital. They learned German as a first language. I was raised on stories of Germans trading diamonds for cigarettes and food rations. Back to the USA where I and my brother Mark were born in the Staten Island Hospital. We lived in a housing project full of returning veterans who became policemen, firemen and all kinds of workers in the post war US. Mom would have to pack up four kids under five years old and take us down an elevator six floors and outside to hang up our clothes to dry on a lot across the street. One day my father came home and announced he bought a house on the wild frontier of Branchburg Township, New Jersey. Only 35 miles from Manhattan, it might as well have been Mongolia. I remember riding in the cab of the moving van where I couldn't see over the dashboard. This move was not what my mother wanted. Her dream was to go over the river into Manhattan...the Georgia girl would have loved pavement under her feet for the rest of her life. But she followed her man to the country. So the Bundaflicka Saga began...