I'm David James Hunt the oldest son of Dave W. Hunt and Zelma Simmons Hunt, my parents.  I wanted to record reflections on my mother to share with my brother and sisters and my children.

The first image that comes to mind concerning my mother is of her sitting directly across the table from me.  I sat on the north end, she sat on the south end.  Mom ate like she was separate from the rest of us; we ate potatoes and gravy, and that woman knew how to make gravy.  We also ate meat, beef, pork, whole chickens, bacon and real butter.  Real butter on everything and we drank milk like we resented the whole idea of being weaned.  Great huge suppers were served to the seven of us.  We ate cream on peaches and peeled apricots, huge bowls of raspberries with pink stained cream and sugar on everything and home made bread sometimes with butter and sugar to dip in the heavy syrup of those peaches.  Wow!  But not Mom, the picture of her is with a small 1/4 size piece of roast with a cob of corn cut in half and a heel of bread in her hand and an inch or two of milk in her glass and a good size pile of greens if we were having them and a couple of small pickled beets.  She would eat raw things throughout the day however, especially carrots just pulled and apron wiped, hand fulls of raspberries and strawberries from her garden, raw corn occasionally and raw potatoes were a favorite of hers, as was postum in the morning.  She and I had many cups of postum together in the dark when I had my early morning paper route and I learned to like it.  I drink it yet.

How many times have I watched her wandering through the yard with an arm full of line dried clothes examining her flowers?  Mom walked everywhere.  She thought nothing of a 2 mile walk round trip to pick up some rick rack in town for one of the girls dresses.  She didn't drive a car because it made her nervous and it was not unusual for her to make the trip twice in one day if she needed to.

I remember when I was six that I saw her round that long sidewalk in front of the Bartholomew place right across from the Pifer's home on her way to town and I realized she was pregnant with who was to become my brother Don.

My mom was always a woman to me. She was the first female that I recall as being good looking.  She was going to a dance with my father and she asked me to see if her seams were straight.  I sat on the floor and looked at the backs of her nylons and I remember to this day how she looked from down there.  She seemed tall for a woman in those days, about 5'6" or 5'7" with her black hair stacked on her head with lazy waves hanging just slightly out of place here and there.  She had full breasts and a small waist and strong hips, not large but full and womanly and she had great looking legs with refined ankles and beautifully turned calves.  She also had a smile of mischief and eyes that could flash with temper and twinkle with an incredible sense of humor.  Mom liked the absurd.  She was a beauty and she was a character and she was a tremendous influence on me.

Mom liked to see us play and sometimes she would get down in the dirt and show us how.  She could figure out how to solve a problem and she could come up with a dozen solutions for any one of them.  She used to order me a truck load of board ends from the saw mill and a load of dirt.  She would have it dumped in the backyard and then she'd let me run rivers, dig tunnels, build dams and just play morning to night and she would laugh at evening time and have me undress in the back hall.

It was not unusual for her to tape or staple a worn out shoe together and it was nothing more than a perspective on what was important and what is not.  She could have easily bought new ones but it was not important to her to wear new shoes for yard work.

I have an area on my neck of small hanging moles, Mom had them too.  She used to carefully tie them off with sewing thread and walk about with the threads hanging until the moles fell off.  Years later I paid $69.00 at a dermatologists to remove 3 of them from my neck.  Now taking the lead from my mother, I simply clip them off with fingernail clippers.  My eyes just aren't good enough anymore to tie the knots.

My mom also could and did tear into a wall in my bedroom and make a bookcase nicely built in.  She started her spring chicks in an empty upstairs bedroom under a lamp and let me hatch bantam eggs in that room as well.  She made kindling with a butcher knife and ran a hose down the drain, packed it with rags and simply blew the plug out when the sink got plugged.

When I raised pigeons they fell in love with her.  They used to follow her to town in a group of 30 and would wait on top of the stores she entered then flutter around her the one mile home.

Hummingbirds sat on her finger.  The neighbor's vicious and huge guard dog was often seen with its head in her hand; the owner was upset.  Stray cats lived around her and her little dog was given a used but full sized wingbacked chair to sleep in in the garage and she would go out and cover the dog with a blanket where it would stay covered all night.  She also put flannel sheets on my bed in the winter.  We all slept in unheated bedrooms back then and she would carry up a wrapped stone or brick from the hearth and put it in bed with me.

Music was an important part of our family life.  While my father's taste ran towards the Sons of the Pioneers, my mother's taste ran towards the more refined.  She liked classical and what I call semi-classical music and she loved the church hymns.  My grandmothers died within hours of each other and I remember going to the funerals.  My mother's mother died in our downstairs bedroom as I recall, Dad's mom died 8 blocks away.  I'm not sure what songs were sung at those services but I would bet that "Oh My Father" and "I Know That My Redeemer Lives," were probably sung.  Mom loved those hymns and she used to hum them while doing house work.  She sang in soprano with a strong and fluttering vibrato and I think, moved easily in a sort of fantasy state much of the time.  She would cock her head and get a dreamy look in her eyes and just really feel the music.  She loved listening to the girls in the family practice the piano and there was really an extraordinary amount of music coming from that old white house on Ohio street.

When I was in my mid 20's I remember watching Mom sit in the kitchen in Dad's chair with a dish towel in her lap with a low white bowl half dried in its folds.  She was listening to my sister Marjorie play a classical number on the piano in the living room.  Mom was completely lost in the experience.  I went upstairs and got my camera, came down and took her picture.  She was never aware that I had done so.  I moved across the kitchen to the breakfast nook and sat there by the telephone on the bench, I believe that would be Maretta's place, and watched her for probably a half hour and I wondered if Mom ever felt cheated by life.  Did she imagine herself at the piano playing something grand and well, with people admiring her?  Did she wish for more education?  Would she have loved a moment or two in the spotlight of fame?  I know she was passionate and I know she was a cultured person in her private way and I know she thought lofty thoughts much of the time.  She was self educated to a large extent and she directed her education better than most of us do.

If the girls were set towards music, I was set toward literature.  Mom taught me to love poetry.  I have a vivid recollection of three or four occasions in the summertime when it was hot and the house was closed to the heat, with the blinds pulled into semi darkness and the breakfast nook windows open and a soft breeze coming through the house toward the open Ohio street door.  Mom had memorized quite a lot of poetry and she would recite it to me.  On those slow afternoons in the half light of that living room, Mom would have me read poetry to her.  Sometimes she would stop me and say, "Put some feeling into it, there that's better."  Years later when her memory of who I was was fading and she was in her mid eighties, I asked her if she remembered any verses of poetry.  She set off on a flawless recitation of "Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright."  She didn't like raw poetry at all and insisted on verse which was uplifting and noble and honorable.

Through the years I wrote a number of poems based on her considerable story telling.  I hope she liked them, but most of all, I hope she knew she was my inspiration.  I see all too clearly the similarities between us, as her mind is fading, so too is mine and looking at her is like looking into a moonlit mirror and seeing the future.  I hope I do as well and I hope someone loves me and cares for me as much as Marjorie and her family has her.

Camping trips were exercises in creativity with Mom as the leader.  We built wall-less out door toilets, stone and sand bathtubs lined with moss and grand stair cases cut into the river bank and the steps were hauled in by hand after careful searches for just the right rocks.  She cooked trout for breakfast that had been out of the water less than 5 minutes and sometimes they would wiggle in the fry pan for a second when they were placed in it.  She gathered flowers, collected pine bows, dried leaves and anything else that could make a soft mattress, and made feather soft beds to sleep in on the ground.

She was thrilled with shooting stars and clouds that could look like anything imaginable that were passing overhead.  When we were at home in the house she would sometimes come in and drag us outside to see the end of a sunset.

Mom used to tell me I was going to go to hell for the sin of lightmindedness, but I was an amateur in comparison with her.  We shared a common sense of humor based on absurdity.  We could get a tale going and build and expand on it for an hour at a time and she would laugh until she was weak, and call me a nut.  Dad was just embarrassed by it all, but he laughed too, though he would distort his face terribly trying not to.

It is my contention that all happy and well adjusted people have to be artists in some way.  Mom had many attributes of an artist.  Sunday dinner was a project three out of every four Sundays.  Often people were invited and often I couldn't figure out who they were and why they were there at all.  Usually they were just someone who was alone; whose wife was gone or dead.  Our neighbor, Ruth Allen, used to eat with us on occasion.  I liked her.  She lived across Ohio street from us.

In the summer we used to have relatives come and stay.  When I was fourteen we had nineteen people for two weeks.  Uncle Albert claimed the last one in had to sleep in the tub.

Mom coped with this and even enjoyed some of it, it seemed.  It's wonderful to me thinking back on it but I wonder how she did it.  Fifty to sixty meals a day in a small hot kitchen and early on with only a wood stove to cook on.  How do you even know how to do it?  She was amazing.  The phone would ring and she would be asked to put together a meal for after the funeral, for a wedding reception or a youth banquet or a church dinner and she could do it.  How do you come to know the amounts to prepare?  How to balance the meal and what goes with what?  How do you get it up and served, hot and delicious?  She could do it and she could do it well.  What does she have so in abundance that I am lacking?  Where did she get the training, and more importantly, where did she get the confidence to do it?  She was an amazing woman.  Sunday dinner has come to represent to me a sort of watermark or measuring device that measures the most noble part of my mother.  We didn't eat in the kitchen, we ate in the dining room.  The table was moved out to the middle of the room from under the mirror on that west wall.  Chairs were gathered from around the house.  The chairs were large with broad seats upholstered in dark wine and silver gray fabric.  One of the chairs had arms on it, Dad sat in that chair, always on the west end, his back to the west wall, his face towards the east window that were French paned.  The chairs were dusted for the occasion, the table stretched to its full length and the leaves placed in.  A multi folded cloth was put on for a pad and that was followed by a table cloth liner which was followed by a nice tablecloth which hung quite low over the table.  I can't remember the last 2 children being much involved in the table setting but the oldest of us were taught how to set a table.  The good silverware was taken out of its mahogany box and examined and certain pieces were polished if necessary.  The dishes were not especially valuable but it was a set, it was the best we had.  The ware was off white with silver edged flowers around the rim.  We knew even as children how to turn the knife and place the forks.  My father had taken me to a nice restaurant when I was very young and taught me how to eat.  I remember well the lesson on how to eat soup and how to hold the utensils and where to place and keep your elbows, control your speed, and to use your napkin, which had to be linen, in his opinion.  The crystal was put on the table for the adults the kids got something a little less fragile.  We would often have a centerpiece of flowers brought in from the yard to grace the table until just before the food was brought in.  Mom always sat on the side of the table near the kitchen door, the meal was served up hot and delicious and in a semi-formal attitude.  Dad may or may not have removed his tie for the occasion, but his shirt was always clean and white and his back pocket held a clean and unused handkerchief.  The handkerchief was only used to clean his rimless glasses and was always carefully refolded and put back in his pocket.  On more than one occasion I saw my father step up to a crying woman and hand her his handkerchief and walk politely away.  He tipped his hat to women, smiled at strangers, held open doors, and took women by the elbow to steady them in bad weather.  Prior to the meal the kitchen was a social center with a variety of boys it seems, ranging from my cousin Tom to a rolling assortment of boyfriends of Maretta's and Mary.  These boys seemed important to me as a young man and Mom seemed to like having them around too.  The dinners were fine and I would like to have just one more of those before I die, but that won't happen.

Mom was the last of that great generation.  I know those dinners were hard for her.  I know they may even, in some theoretical sense, have detracted from the Sabbath.  Those dinners were, however, the last great show of dignity, and a ritual that lifted the family upwards to a higher self image.  They were also a great binding of the spirit of the family.  I thank my mother for that great example and the great sacrifice she made.

I remember to this day how safe I felt there in that great white house, the dinner over, the dishes washed and the table dismantled.  The dessert would come later when the dinner had settled.

In the winter there was the warmth of the fireplace and in the summer the sound of the cicadas buzzing in the trees outside and there was a breeze in the breakfast nook moving the curtains.  There was such a security in seeing my parents napping on the couch like two spoons, my father's arms around my mother; they used to complain about our noise and move into their bedroom downstairs to complete their nap.  There was no safer or more spiritual or more sensual feeling than that, neither could a Sabbath be more remembered or loved.  In too many ways the best of us and our futures was sold when time and circumstance changed us to more menial, more practical and less noble ways of living our lives.

Mom, I would install in a special place on my property, a brass gong of subtle tone and cordial resonance, to be rung on Sunday to remind me of what you brought to my life and to mourn those great lessons I have abandoned.

As a post log I would like to add that my mother carried dinners to Mrs. Fleetwood, who was dying.  She went over and did Theora Wyatt's hair.  Mrs. Wyatt had a large family and was sick, stricken with Parkinsons disease.  She sat with my Aunt Florence and she did all this so quietly, without any fanfare.  And one last short story, I remember the clothes she sewed for urchins who walked by on their way to school or town day after day in the winter without coats.  My mother would concoct incredible plans to find a way to get rid of brand new things she had sewn just for them so the people she gave them to felt like they were doing her a favor by taking them.  She was an endless font of generosity and empathy.  I think with her passing, the family will fracture and though some section of it will stay together, it will not survive.  The cousins don't know each other and we are spread out too far, too wide, and the world has changed.  I mourn that loss like the loss of my mother and father.  I know that my mother is still living, but I write this, I guess, as though she were dead because the vital, vibrant woman she was, is dead to me.  I hope no one takes offense at this.  I hope other people write their recollections because I'm sure mine are unique to me.  I missed many things that might come to me from my brothers and sisters and people who know her and I encourage you to write them down or tape them and make them available.