The last days of August always make me remember my folks, Norman Busk and Evelyn Anderson Busk.\u00a0 My father\u2019s birthday was August 21st and my mother\u2019s August 31st.\u00a0 She was a little over two years older than he was.<\/p>\n
According to family legend\u2014as told by Grandpa Anderson–my father showed up at the house as a young buck courting my mother\u2019s younger sister.\u00a0 Grandpa always insisted that he told him, \u201cNorman, in this house we eat the old bread first,\u201d causing my father to end up with my mother, Evie, as opposed to my Aunt Toots.<\/p>\n
Because my mother didn\u2019t want to be a \u201ccradle robber,\u201d she set their wedding date for August 24, 1936, three days after my father turned twenty and seven days before she turned twenty-two.\u00a0 That way there was only a year between them when they married, and he was no longer a teenager.<\/p>\n
It was a match made in heaven that lasted for sixty-eight years and seven kids and countless grandkids.\u00a0 They were steady, hard-working people with rock solid values and keen senses of humor.\u00a0 They loved jokes\u2014a teaspoon with a hole in it in the sugar bowl; a half cup that really was a cup cut in half.\u00a0 If someone asked for only half a cup of coffee, that was the one my mother brought out.<\/p>\n
My mother, a stay at home mom with only a seventh grade education, cooked three meals a day for nine people.\u00a0 She sewed most of my dresses. She washed clothes on Monday and ironed on Tuesday like clockwork.\u00a0 She canned peaches and apricots in the dead of summer in Arizona. She herded kids around and made sure we got to scouts and Pilgrim Fellowship and Sunday school and choir practice and little league.\u00a0 Once there were paper routes in the family, she oversaw those and made sure that the monies from that were properly handled.\u00a0 And, if one of us got out of line, there was none of this \u201cwait \u2019til your father gets home\u201d nonsense. \u00a0She was perfectly capable of taking a fly swatter to the wrongdoer’s backside if the crime in question merited that kind of punishment.<\/p>\n
My father worked\u2014always\u2014but we often teased him about not being able to hold a job.\u00a0 He started out as a farmer; taught school for a time; became an underground miner; drove truck; worked as a carpenter for Phelps Dodge above ground; started a construction company; started a cement business, and eventually\u2014at age 40\u2014found a permanent niche in the life insurance business.<\/p>\n
He didn\u2019t make a lot of money, but he and my mother were careful with what they had.\u00a0 They always paid cash for their cars and seldom bought new ones.\u00a0 They tackled home remodeling jobs together although Evie did lay down the law and announce that once she turned 75, she wasn\u2019t doing roofing any more.<\/p>\n
I remember growing up in a home filled with laughter and music.\u00a0 Believe me, Norman had a lot to do with the laughter and nothing at all to do with the music.\u00a0 We always said, \u201cThere are 88 keys on the piano, and Daddy sings in the cracks.\u201d Evie, without ever having taken a music lesson, taught us to sing in three and four part harmony.\u00a0 She was also an encyclopedia of song lyrics, and we sang while we did dishes and housework and while we were crammed like sardines in hot cars driving back and forth to South Dakota to visit relatives during summer vacation:\u00a0 They Cut Down the Old Pine Tree; Ain\u2019t We Crazy; Sweet Violets; In the Baggage Coach Ahead; Vive La Cookery Maid; There\u2019s a Lonely Little Robin.<\/p>\n
The occasion of my folks’ 65th wedding anniversary was the last one when we were all together before losing my younger brother, Jim.\u00a0 We sat around in a hotel party room and sang all those old songs.\u00a0 When we left, Bill turned to me and said, \u201cHow did you all learn to sing in harmony?\u201d To which I replied, \u201cDoesn\u2019t everybody?\u201d<\/p>\n
As my parents aged, they had their challenges.\u00a0 My father had short term memory loss and couldn\u2019t remember how to get home.\u00a0 My mother had macular degeneration and couldn\u2019t drive, but she would tell him where to turn.\u00a0 Together they made it work.<\/p>\n
Jim\u2019s death at age fifty due to an undiagnosed heart ailment, was a loss from which my parents never fully recovered.\u00a0 His presence in town had allowed them to stay in their own home long after they would have had to call it quits.\u00a0 Once he was gone, they had to move to assisted living.\u00a0 When my father died of a stroke a few years after that, the light and laughter went out of my mother\u2019s life as well.\u00a0 When she passed away, I couldn\u2019t summon any tears because I knew that away was exactly where she wanted to be.<\/p>\n
And so, at the end of August, I can\u2019t help but remember those two wonderful people who put their shoulders to the wheel and their noses to the grindstone and did it together for close to seventy years.<\/p>\n
Happy Birthdays.\u00a0 Happy Anniversary.<\/p>\n
And for the record, I\u2019m not releasing any helium balloons, fictional or otherwise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The last days of August always make me remember my folks, Norman Busk and Evelyn Anderson Busk.\u00a0 My father\u2019s birthday was August 21st and my mother\u2019s August 31st.\u00a0 She was a little over two years older than he was. According to family legend\u2014as told by Grandpa Anderson–my father showed up at the house as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-nf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1441"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1442,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1441\/revisions\/1442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}