Mother's Day = Renewal

I was a bit of a negative Nellie last week and by the end of the week I was in drastic need of time to recharge. Thankfully a short trip to Houston to spend most of the weekend with mom and dad seems to have done the trick.

I left early Saturday morning...as in I pulled into mom and dad's driveway by 9:10 am. We proceeded to hang nine more pictures in places around the house and then we went through mom's jewelery. I love jewelery...if you know me you know this...so it was especially fun for me. Mom shared stories about certain pieces that are particularly meaningful to her. We also put a certain number of pieces in the "garage sale" bag. The highlight was relocating two charms mom had made in 1986 of my sister's and my silhouettes. She's never worn them, but she did today and I think she will more often in the future.


We also found a buried treasure in the box of pictures we were working through. There was a framed, weathered image of a downtown scene--a small-town downtown scene. I had never seen it and mom said she thought dad had had it up in his dorm room and then in his home office in St. Louis. I asked dad more about it and he said it is one of the few mementos he has from his Grandma Martha, his dad's mom. We were trying to decided what kind of print it was, because it was not a photo, but it was in color, but it wasn't a true painting either. I opened the back and it was a newspaper clipping. The article was folded over so just the picture showed, so we could still read it.

It's a painting of the downtown of Webster City, IA. The painting is by Grant Shaw and was featured in the Des Moines register because he had done a series of small towns in Iowa. The article is dated 1957. Webster City is significant enough to frame because it is where Grandma Martha was from before she married Great-Grandpa Waterman. I need to research more, such as who framed it for Grandma Martha and what Webster City is like today. But what fun to find such a treasure!

A little fun with mom and dad has me feeling ready to begin the week. There are two weeks left in the school year, which means many details to attend to in the next few days. My prayer is that the seniors hang in there just a little bit longer and the underclassmen finish strong.