It is almost mother's day and I've been musing on mom. I grew up in a little house. I never realized just how little until my brother Floyd and I made our pilgrimage there while visiting Yakima a while back. It is now a place of business with some minimal changes to the outside but the inside bland with desks and files. We asked if we could walk through to take a look. We tried to not have our jaws drop when the rooms just didn't match what was in our memories. The outside walls hadn't changed but the rooms seemed unbelievably small. Can rooms shrink?? It seemed so. To our childhood eyes our kitchen was spacious. The living room seemed grand, filled with furniture but still roomy. The three bedrooms big enough for us to play even big games (like basketball) in. But it took just a minute to sweep our eyes across the tiny rooms. What a strange feeling. On the other hand the thing that was small is now large. Opposite world! Every summer my mother would be at the side of the house hacking away at a bush. Being a carefree child of the '50's whose only job outside was to run free during the summer I never had to do that job. I didn't realize how she was really taming nature. I have a clear memory of her turning to me one day while working on that bush and saying if I didn't cut this down "it would just become a tree". And indeed it did.
