Today is my sweet mama’s Angelversary. It’s been 12 years…it hardly seems possible. It took a full decade, and losing Mr. Virgo, before I stopped trying to pick up the phone on Sunday nights to call her. She died just six weeks before her first great grandchild was born. Oh…she would have loved these girls!
My mom was “Mom” to all my friends. She loved them all like her own. And the feelings were mutual. We had lots of slumber parties at my house and Mom had as much fun as us girls did. I could make my mom laugh till she could hardly catch her breath and that was one of my greatest joys. That woman loved to laugh and she deserved every bit of it she could get. She didn’t have an easy life.
Born in Mishawauka, Indiana in 1925, Wanda Belle was the oldest surviving child of six…three boys and three girls. She wrote with an exquisite Spencerian script that I envied greatly. She was an exacting seamstress and an equally exacting taskmaster as I was learning to sew. I ripped out countless seams that weren’t up to her standards. We didn’t always see eye to eye about a lot of things. I am not proud of some of the ways I treated her growing up, even though she warned me of such a risk. But I loved her with abandon.
She was an overprotective mother, especially when it came to my brother, Gary. She never pushed him to do more than what she thought he was capable of due to his cerebral palsy and a developmental disability. I remember he got lost once while trying to take the public bus to her office and she was scared to death. I understand it more now because there isn’t a human being on this planet that owns more real estate in my heart than my brother and my immediate family. She did the best she knew how.
She absolutely had a heart of gold. I was frustrated with her once because she had a full one quarter of her basement filled with clothes that didn’t fit her. When I asked her why, she said she just wanted to help those poor people trying to have yard sales so she would buy things she thought were pretty or had a high quality fabric that she could reuse. Never mind that she hadn’t sewn anything since I graduated from high school. But that’s how she was…kind, generous, loving…quite naïve to the ways of the world.
She is my Angel Mama now, and my, oh my…..she surely would have LOVED Mr. Virgo! She would have thought, as I did, that he was movie-star handsome and she would have basked in the glow of his affections, as we all did. I picture him dropping by to take her out for coffee up in heaven and spoiling her more than just a little bit. She deserves that.
I miss you, Wanda Belle!
❤️