A mother's generosity

By Larry Kiewel

She was the youngest daughter of the youngest daughter of prairie pioneers. Born in an April blizzard in 1927, she was educated in a one-room school, babysat for her sister in town to go to high school, and rode a train to attend the land grant university clear across the state. 

She was a red head, tall, and graceful. She was easy to find in church or school or horse show or county fair. Whatever she wore was accessorized with a large electric smile. She could dance, or roller skate, or ride horseback. 

She could garden or build fence or stack hay bales. She could birth a lamb or a calf or a foal in all sorts of weather or the darkest of nights. She was officially a teacher and every encounter with her was an opportunity to learn.

I am the oldest of her six children. Each of us learned to play an instrument and can read music. We know how to read out loud for church. We have all been trained in Robert’s Rules of Order and can conduct a committee meeting and plan an event. We all have a college degree and a little extra. 

There are 12 grandchildren, most all of them can read music and have college degrees. The 24 great grandchildren are on their way with education and music and an understanding of church etiquette. It is easy for me to argue that civilization will be preserved by our agrarian roots.

We ate vegetables that we grew ourselves and preserved in jars in the basement or in the giant chest freezer. We raised enough chickens to feed us for a year and raised our own beef and traded for pork in season. Looking back, I should be most amazed that we ate three meals a day every day. Money was not easily found in the 50s when we were all young, but there was always enough. We had home-baked bread and scratch-made cookies and cake. My mother’s chocolate chip cookies are still the standard to which all cookies are compared.

Those meals fed all of us in our house, but also anyone who might be passing by. What I know about generosity came from that table, not the lectures or the Sunday mornings sitting in the front row of church or all the reading I have done. We always had enough. Enough that we could share with whoever might need our food or our time or our strength or our talents.

Being generous might be the hardest part of being my mother’s son. So much of this modern world is about keeping and holding on to what is yours. But if your mother survived the Great Depression, and the Dust Bowl, and World War II, then you know that holding tight to possessions does not make the world better. You must go to church and live the lessons you hear. Life and its trappings is a gift and if we honor its giftedness when we recognize not ownership but community.

The gift of a large family then is that we get through life by sharing. Generosity is the single most important quality of a community. Food in the pantry, time to sit on a committee, labor for a project that helps others, or to sit with someone and share a quiet moment build us up in ways that can’t be measured, except that our community is a better place for abundant life.