Mama is the last of our parents. She is the only living grandparent my children have left. She is all that stands between us being the "old folks" of the family.
Mama was, like many women, a brave woman. But her bravery was in a class of its own, being called on to follow Daddy and haul us all off to the wilds of South America, including a stint in the Amazon rainforest, before the Amazon rainforest was cool. Before it was ever heard much of at all, actually.
For a kid, that is Adventure in Spades. For a mom, not so much. She, reluctantly, took on the homeschooling of three children, before homeschooling was cool. She had to learn how to cook foods she had never seen or heard of. She had to wash the family laundry in the river. Not unlike the Pioneer women of American history, she had to hold the fort while Daddy traipsed off deeper into the jungle in search of gold and other precious things, for weeks and months at a time, with no communication whatever, and only a hope that he would come back.
Later we moved to town where she counted herself oh-so-fortunate to find a missionary hospital to have her baby in, a hospital run and staffed by a Seventh Day Adventist missionary doctor and his nurse/wife, who became lifelong family friends.
I can only now appreciate the courage it took for her to go, three ~ and then four ~ children in tow, off to where there were headhunters lurking behind every tree.
Even now, when asked about it, she will often reply with "Don't remind me."
