My mother was born in 1932 and lived as a child through the Worst Hard Time, her family options hollowed out by the dust storms and the great depression. She knew hardship, lean times and cold nights, parents challenged and changed by those times, but from that sprang a woman with a strength, spirit and undaunted intelligence and curiosity. 
She was born into a family of pioneers and homesteaders. Her great grandfather was one of the first founders of Dodge City, Kansas, and there were many family stories passed down of the Wild West in its infancy. She inherited the genealogy bug from her grandparents and delighted in discovering that ancestors of hers were among the very first settlers of New York, indeed, not ten miles from where she and Bruce ultimately settled, her ancestors helped build the first fort in New Amsterdam in 1621. It made perfect sense to her that she, whose family had been moving westward for three hundred years, would back east and close the circle. 
When she met my dad, Mom was a vivacious California girl, living just off Route 66, swimming in the Colorado River, listening to cool jazz in the 1950s. My dad was a handsome Marine Corps officer. Their adventures in building our wonderful family included 12 years of many moves to accommodate the military assignments my father served. No easy task moving young children and pets from one state to another, yet the spirit of adventure and new things each move brought is what stands out for us in retrospect – the curiosity she encouraged in us to discover what was special in each new place, and a wonderful ability to embrace those discoveries with us. 
When they settled down in Colonie in 1964, my Mom changed with the times. She learned yoga and explored gourmet and international cooking with her friends. She was a gifted gardener with a strong love of the local flora, and she worked hard to incorporate and nurture wild flowers into her gardens. I remember when a large swath of wooded land near our house was slated for a new development. She rounded some of us up to go into the woods and save some of the plants. I think we still have the Jack-in-the-Pulpits in our front garden from that adventure.
She also strongly identified with the emerging women’s rights movement. As soon as she was able, she returned to school and proudly graduated from the University at Albany 1982 with the first Master’s degree in her family, in Classics. Her gifts, curiosity and enthusiasm with regards to ancient language, history and literature won her the admiration of members of the Classics department and provided her with a lifetime of delight. She maintained an unabated interest in classical archeology.
Not long before she passed, Mom told Laura that if she had been born later she might have been a truly modern woman. I think she was way more modern than me. Though I’ve ‘done’ and ‘had’ the things she associated with modernity, she was the true pioneer – she walked a less guided path with little support and a lot of pluck. I loved her courage in reading her way into the ancient world, discovering a rarified road to a place where there were women as well as men in the pantheon. She could have followed more traditional routes in gaining a business or teaching degree but she followed her bliss, did the hard work of learning languages no longer spoken to gain access into an intellectual place with a grace and aesthetic she appreciated. 
And I loved that she shared this with me! Most teenagers would groan at the thought of going to the same college as their Mom but I found it incredibly invigorating meeting my Mom in the Rathskeller and talking about her Catullus translations.
So Bon Voyage Mom, visit the places you longed to see and keep in touch!
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