Mother's Day - when Bucky died, Anne B. of Bailey's in Tivoli told me "not a day goes by I don't think of my mother" and I find that this is very true.  Our Mother, Bucky, is not an easy person to forget, even for a day.

I took a class on siblings this Spring, mostly about rivalry in the family, and a lot of this trouble was caused by a parent liking one sibling more than another, and being stupid enough to say it.  Once in a while, one of us would ask Bucky, "Who do you love most?" and her answer was always the same - "I hate you all equally."  Quite a good answer I thought while I listened to my classmates complaining about their sisters and brothers. 

But then there was the gentle, motherly side of Bucky, who would say (I think from an old Latin story) "These are my jewels" meaning us six kids.  Bucky didn't have much jewelry, other than us kids.  She did have golden earrings, a gift from our father, who would sing a song about giving golden earrings to his love - I think a Nat King Cole song.  She never wore a necklace or anything around her neck.  She used to say, "I must have been hanged in another life, I can't stand anything tight on my neck."  That was another thing about Bucky, she would come up with those sayings and somehow we believed her.  So Bucky didn't care about jewelry, or clothes, she was happy in an old loose house dress.  In the sixties I made her pant's suits and she started to wear pants then.  Bucky wasn't one for makeup either, she used to have a tiny compact filled with rouge and maybe a lipstick tucked in her purse.  When I was little she used to always  carry a bottle of salts, "in case I faint" but I never remember her fainting.  She would uncap the bottle to let me smell and the smell was strong enough to wake the dead.

I remember when she died, Maria and I went to the house.  Plans were being made for her funeral and Bob and Diane were looking for clothes.  Two blouses were out but they weren't sure which would fit her.  Maria grabbed the shirts and took them into the bathroom to try them on.  She said, "If one of them fits me, it will fit Grandma."  And that's how it was decided.  The funeral home gave her the makeup she had never used.  Her brother Ed thought she looked beautiful and remarked she looked like a "young Ma", their mother.  But I will always think of Bucky as wearing the loose house dress, safety pins attached for any emergency, throwing a comb through her hair, racing to join Grandma who was in the car, tooting impatiently for her to come out the door.   Happy Mother's Day Buck.