Best Mother a Girl Ever Had (October 21, 2005)

As far back as I can remember, I knew that I had the best mother in the world.  She was warm, gentle and loving.  When I hurt, she comforted me. I learned that the hurt diminished with love. Once I was roller-skating in the kitchen while she was cooking dinner.  I slipped and crashed to the floor, breaking my arm.  It really hurt!  I howled.  She turned the dinner off, helped me up off the floor and took me to the doctor. I learned I was more important to my mother than cooking that dinner. The doctor put on a cast and, in a few short weeks, I was good as new.  I learned I could heal.
 

 When I was happy, she laughed with me. I fell down so often as a child, it got to be funny; instead of crying, I would burst out laughing.  She would come running when she heard the crash and then, when she found me laughing, she would join right in.  I learned joy made life more fun. When I was sad, she put her arm around me and assured me things would get better.  They always did, so I learned trust.  If I made a mistake, she said it was OK. “Everyone makes mistakes,” she said.  I learned you don’t have to be perfect.

When I was little and had croup at night, my mother would appear at my bedside and turn on the vaporizer, reassuring me that the coughing would calm down.  When it did, I learned my mother was not only comforting, but also smart.  Whenever I had a question, she would stop whatever she was doing and try to answer it to my satisfaction.  I learned that, if I didn’t know something, it was good to ask questions, and I could get answers

If I was frightened, she would help me resolve my fear.  When I was in the fifth grade, I was so afraid of my teacher that I didn’t want to go to school.  My mother called the teacher and asked if we three could meet to talk about my fear and find out how to resolve it.  It worked.  The teacher turned out to be one of my favorites. My mother had taught me that it’s best not to hide from trouble but to face it head on. 

 

When I was very little, I was shy.  My mother would always keep me with her when she had friends over or take me when she went to visit friends. She included me in the conversation.  I discovered it was easy to talk to people.  If you showed interest in them, they showed interest in you. I quickly outgrew my shyness. I learned I loved spending time with other people.

Whenever anybody around had trouble, my mom was the first one at his or her doorstep, offering a helping hand. I remember when one of my mom’s best friends had to leave town to help her parents.  She asked my mom to check on her husband and the house while she was away.  Everyday mom would go over and check to be sure the husband had food and the house was clean.

The day before her friend was due back in town, mom took me with her to check the house. We arrived to find the husband’s dirty dishes covered with thousands of dead ants.  He apparently got up in the morning and found ants on the dishes. So he got out the bug spray and killed them.  Mom wasn’t about to leave that mess for her friend to come home to, so we washed up the dishes and cleaned all the counters.  My mom always believed in the old saying, “Do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.”  I learned the value and the reward of helping others. 

The valuable life lessons I learned daily from my mom have helped me every day of my life.  I am so grateful I was the girl lucky enough to have the best mom in the world.
                                                               

[Editorial Note:  The fifth grade teacher who Nola initially  feared was the highly-regarded Marguerite Montgomery, for whom the Marguerite Montgomery Elementary School would eventually be named.--wdh]

                    

Elementary School Years Memory---A Very Special Christmas Present (October 7, 2005)

     This story took place in early December, 1949. The location was Central Davis Elementary School, three blocks from my beloved childhood home.
 

     I was in the first grade.  My life long best girlfriend, Helen, had recently moved to Davis from Riverside, California.  She lived one block from my house and was in my class. It was exciting to have a best friend, a person with whom I could share my joys and sorrows.  Little did I know that soon I would be experiencing both of those emotions almost simultaneously.

     The holiday season was fast approaching.  Our teacher, Mrs. Barbiere, told us we would all draw names and exchange gifts in class on the last day of school before vacation.

     The Christmas season was then, and is to this day, my favorite time of the year. I love the cold weather.  Cold, of course, is a relative term in California, compared to most of the rest of the country, since we see snow so seldom in Davis.

      I didn’t see any snow in Davis from the time I was five years old until my husband and I moved back to Davis in 1969, from an 8-year hiatus to San Francisco. Three of the next four years in Davis, it snowed around the holidays.   In the past 30 years, if memory serves me correctly, Davisites have only seen snow here twice.

     Despite the lack of snow in my childhood, my enthusiasm in first grade escalated daily in December. We decorated the whole room, including a tree to put our little packages around. 

.     As a child, I loved making gifts at school for my family.  I also loved wrapping those gifts in bright colored paper and putting on shiny ribbons.  When I was allowed to add a little glitter to the packages, I was in heaven.

     I personally wrapped the secret gift mom and I had selected for the classmate whose name I had drawn. The package wasn’t wrapped as fancy as I would have liked, but it was presentable. I was very relieved to have picked a girl.  It was easy to shop for a girl, of course, because I knew what girls liked. When all of the packages had arrived in the classroom, we circled around the tree and looked them all over. One package stood out as very special to me.  It was a small box with white paper and a beautiful gold bell, tied on with pretty ribbon on the top of the box.  It seemed like everyone in the class favored that present, and everyone hoped it would be theirs.

     The presents were labeled by number, so no one knew until Mrs. Barbiere passed them out who would be the lucky person to get the special present.  I couldn’t imagine I would be lucky enough to be the winner, but I hoped and prayed.  

     Many names were called and the special package was still there. Dare I continue to hope? At last, it was my turn.  The teacher called my name and handed me the prized package.  Oh joy, oh rapture! My wish had come true.  I carefully removed the little bell, ribbon and paper, then quickly opened the lid of the little box. 

     Inside that beautiful package was, of all things, a pair of pink underwear! It had been brought by one of the boys!  To this day, I have never figured out why anyone’s mother would send underwear to school as a present for a classmate!  I can assure you that the pink in the underwear could not compare to the red in my face. Most all of my classmates howled in laughter.

     I was most grateful to have an understanding best friend to stand by me in my most embarrassing moment.  Helen understood and didn’t laugh. She consoled me all the way home.

     I had wanted that package so much.  I had often heard, “Don’t pray for what you don’t need!” Now I understood why.  When I received that gift it reaffirmed another thing I had always been taught.  It is better to give than to receive.

Nola, Thomas & our neighbor, Kari Wilson (November 1972)

Dawn & Kari Wilson, William and Nola (November 1973)

Earliest Home Memory—Windows in My World (October 10, 2005)

Bradley House viewed from backyard (January 1966)

      I was 3½ when I moved to Davis, California, with my parents, and my big brother, Michael.  He was 5.  We were both very excited as we were moving into the whole upstairs, and would each have our own rooms.  We had shared a room in our little house in Klamath Falls, Oregon, so this was a big step for us. We arrived in the fall of 1946.  Our house was at 233 Rice lane, between A and B and First and Second Streets.  The leaves on the big trees outside our house were beginning to turn beautiful shades of red and yellow. 

     I loved living upstairs.  My bedroom was at the front of the house.  I had two windows.  One looked over the front yard.  I could see the giant oak tree at the side of our yard and behind it the giant redwood tree in our neighbor’s yard. The other window overlooked the driveway and the big trees that lined it. I spent many happy hours looking out those paned windows onto the beautiful green world below.

     When we opened the front door, we were in the entry hall. There was a coat closet, the telephone cubicle and the stairs rising to our upstairs world.  There was a short banister on that stairway and every chance we got we would slid down that banister. What fun!

     To the left of the entry hall was my parent’s room; it was right below my room. That fact I found very comforting.  To the right of the hall was the living room.  It seemed huge to me.  There was a fireplace on the front wall in the middle of the room.  I can still see the Christmas stockings hung by that chimney with care. There were two lead-paned windows that looked out to the front of the house. There was one window at each end of the room, on either side of the fireplace. To this day, I love driving by and seeing those warm and welcoming windows.   At the farthest end of the room was a very large paned window that looked out to the hedge between our house and the neighbors.  On the back wall was another good size window that looked out to our patio.  And a little to the left of that were French doors that opened onto that patio.

    Remarkably, in my youth, I managed to break panes in both large windows and the French doors.  I jumped through the French doors.  I was leaping for a stick my brother threw for me. I was pretending to be his dog and crashed head-first through one of the lower panes of glass.  I rocked over backwards in my little red rocking chair through the window at the end of the room, headfirst. And I managed to break the other window by falling off the back of the couch, which I had been sitting on. I was so rambunctious, I’m sure my folks often wondered if I would live through my childhood.

   Beyond the living room was our formal dinning room.  It had a huge paned window that looked out to my swing in the back yard.  My seat at the table faced that window. What a treat!  I still remember, when I was five years old, standing at the dinning room window and staring out at the snow falling on Christmas Day—what a thrill that was!  My brother and I couldn’t wait to get outside to play in the beautiful white icy flakes.  The snow didn’t last long, but we made the most of every minute!

     The first thing I remember my father doing in the back yard was hanging a swing for me!  I spent a significant amount of time on that swing every day.  I can still feel the breeze blowing around my braids as I swung higher and higher.  I would often swing until I would rock myself to sleep and awaken by thudding onto the ground, beneath my treasured swing.

     To the left of the dinning room was our cozy kitchen.  I loved “helping” my mother in the kitchen, even as a small child.  To this day I look back on the wonderful hours my mother and I spend talking and working together in that kitchen.  I loved every minute of it.

     To the left of the kitchen was our back porch.  It was a laundry room and a pet feeding area.  I always had a dog and my brother always had a cat.

      To the left of the laundry room was the basement door.  This led to one of our favorite playrooms in the house.

     I would spend the next 15 years of my life living in that house and another 10 years visiting my parents in that same house with my husband David, and our four children: Kelly, William, Thomas and Kate.  They, too, got to look through all the beautiful windows in my childhood home, and they never broke even one pane of glass.

Haggerty Family Wedding (February 10, 2006)

What a happy day! 

October 15, 2005

These are pictures of the Haggerty family taken the day our youngest daughter, Kate, married Stephen Stockstad. The bride and groom selected the location, The Petaluma Pumpkin Patch, on Hwy 101 as their wedding site

Kate and Stephen both love Halloween. It is their favorite holiday. For three years the couple visited the patch about six times each Halloween season. We called the owner, Jim Goverman, and asked if we could use the patch for the wedding. He had never had a wedding there in the 13 years the patch had been open, but he was excited and agreed to the 4:00 PM wedding.

 

Kate was afraid the guests would be reluctant to wear costumes. Both she and Stephen were happily surprised to see all the guests arrive in colorful and creative Halloween attire.

Kate and Stephen selected matching honeybee outfits, which set them apart as the bride and groom. In the top row from the left we see David, father of the bride, appropriately dressed as the beekeeper. The bride selected my costume: I was a red butterfly. Standing next to me is our oldest son, William. He came as a court jester and took all the wedding movies. Our oldest daughter, Kelly (aka. Dr. Pain), was the bride’s maid. Tom, our youngest son, and his wife, Alayne, came appropriately dressed as a priest and nun. Tom is an ordained minister and performed the wedding ceremony. Sister Alayne, controlled the wedding music.

 

David’s sister, Aunt Debby, dressed as a beautiful witch. Taylor and William came as the Grim Reaper and a pirate. They are William's sons and were ring bearers for the service. Claudia, William’s wife, dressed as a beautiful black cat. She helped me hand out the bubbles to the guests to blow after the ceremony. Claudia and William’s daughters were both flower girls for the ceremony: Barbara, dressed as Dorothy of Oz, and Bella, a white fairy. It was definitely a family affair. Stephen’s brother, Jeffrey, was the best man as well as a clown. I remember the first time we met Stephen, he told us his best friend was his brother

As you can see in the photos, there’s a smile on every face. What a happy time. What a wonderful occasion to get a family picture. The best gift everyone got in the family for Christmas that year was a picture of this treasured family event.