Happy Mother’s Day.  My mother, Evie, is gone, but I see her smiling face every day whenever we’re here in Tucson.  There’s a framed photo of her sitting on the top shelf in the library.  The photo is right next to a small collection of leather-bound copies of my books.  Those are special editions that my publisher sends me whenever one of my books hits the top ten on the NYTimes Bestsellers list.  I know my mother would be proud of me, and I’m grateful to her.  I wouldn’t be where I am today had Evelyn Busk not raised me the way she did.  And her child rearing philosophy was a direct result of the way she was raised by her mother, Cecelia Fromm Anderson.

Which reminds me of something one of my long ago editors told me–an editor whose tenure with me was short but brief.  “Judy,” she said, “the problem with your characters is that they always do things because of the way they were raised.”  Try as I might I couldn’t then and still can’t view that as a “problem.”  After all, characters are people, too, and all of us, fictional or not, are–for good or ill–a reflection of how we were raised.

Because I was a young child when we left South Dakota, much of what I know about Grandpa and Grandma Anderson is the stuff of family legend rather than personal knowledge or observation.  Grandpa Anderson, Andrew Gottfried, aka A.G., was a newly arrived Swedish immigrant who made his way to South Dakota where he found work driving a dray wagon.  Cecelia Fromm was a maid-of-all work in a hotel that was, according to my mother, owned by Tom Brokaw’s grandparents.  One weekend, at an after work party, A.G. caught sight of Cecelia dancing on a table.  That, as they say, was that.  Theirs was a love match, one that never wavered.  When Cecelia died of a heart ailment in her fifties, the expression of utter shock and disbelief on Grandpa Anderson’s face when he heard the news was my first-ever experience of grief made visible.

Grandma Anderson as I knew her was relatively short (compared to the rest of us), round, and sweet.  When we went to South Dakota on family vacations, she put out the welcome mat and killed the proverbial fatted calf.  She would cheerfully lay out a feast of pot roast, potatoes with their jackets on, and green peas fresh from the garden.  One of my most vivid memories from South Dakota is of sitting next to Grandma Anderson on the back porch of their house in Summit, shelling peas, with both of us sneaking one or two from each pod as we went along.  (Is there anything better than a raw green pea fresh from the pod?  Oh wait, yes there is–sweet corn plucked from its stalk and eaten raw, too.  That’s another thing Grandma Anderson taught me–the miracle of utterly fresh raw corn.).  By comparison, if we showed up on Grandma Busk’s doorstep on one of those trips, hungry and tired after three long days in a car, she would grudgingly haul out a loaf of bread and butter and maybe, if we were really lucky, a pot of jam.

Both of my paternal grandparents were toxic.  My father often told me that he never knew what love was until he met my mother.  I suspect that my mother’s insistence on moving from South Dakota to Arizona was based as much on curing my father’s arthritis as it was on escaping his parents’ sphere of influence. Soon after our move, Grandpa and Grandma Anderson sold their farm and moved to Summit and into the house in town where I remember them living.  Being free of the farm meant they were free to travel, and they did.

Originally, our house in Bisbee was a two bedroom affair, but it had a full unfinished basement.  On one of their first trips to Bisbee, Grandpa and my dad turned the basement into a one bedroom apartment.  Grandpa was a whiz at carpentry.  I remember watching him laying the hardwood floor–eyeballing the spot, cutting the wood, and then unerringly fitting it into place.  If he used a measuring tape, I don’t recall seeing it.  Once work on the basement apartment was finished, Grandpa and Grandma turned into regular snowbirds, spending South Dakota’s harsh winter months in Bisbee, living downstairs.

As a first grader, walking home from Greenway School one day, I caught sight of a stray puppy, a poor, ugly little mutt that someone had abandoned on the street.  It was small enough for me to carry, which I did.  However, once I arrived at the house, I attempted to convince my mother that the dog had “followed me” home.  My mother wasn’t buying.  She told me, in no uncertain terms, that the dog had to go.  Heartbroken, I put the pup back out on the street.

It happened that Grandpa and Grandma Anderson were visiting at the time.  The next morning, when Grandma came upstairs for breakfast, she was wearing a long green sweater.  During the meal I noticed that, whenever my mother’s back was turned, Grandma would slip a tiny piece of bacon or toast under her sweater.  Not only had she brought the puppy back inside, she had already named her–Daisy.  It’s one of the few times I ever remember my mother being overruled, but she was. Daisy became an integral part of our lives for the next twelve years.

I don’t know where the “dog rescue” bit shows up on the human genome or in my DNA, but I know it’s there, handed down, generation to generation, from Grandma Anderson to me.  It’s why Bella is sleeping peacefully on the back patio right now, saved from becoming a flat dog on that street in Bellevue three years ago.  But Grandma Anderson’s dog-saving trait didn’t stop with me.  It’s why my daughter rescued Snowflake, an unsocialized puppy mill mommy who was terrified of everything beyond the outside wooden pen that had been her prison for the first six years of her life.  Three years later, Snowflake, has morphed into a lovely family dog.  It’s why a year ago my daughter and grandson rescued a black twenty-pound pound puppy named Storm who is now a gangly, hundred pound Irish wolfhound which my husband refers to as The Galoot.

And so, Happy Mother’s Day, Grandma Anderson.  You never met your great-granddaughter, Jeanne T., or your great-great-grandson, Colt, but I’m here to tell you, they are both chips off your old block.

Other than Daisy, you never met any of the dogs you helped rescue, either, but they all wish you a Happy Mother’s Day, too.