This is a repost from another Mother’s Day several years ago.

This was a year that would have created problems for us.

Mother’s Day on May 10. My mom’s birthday on May 15. The problem was that we lived across the island and had busy professional lives in town. Two separate celebrations in the same week was hard for us to fit in, but the background guilt of letting one of these occasions go unrecognized was also hard to cope with. I recall that we ended up with one event, lunch or dinner, but with presents attributed to both occasions.

That seemed to work relatively well.

Musing about my mother….

I wasn’t home schooled, but I was definitely home educated by my mother, Helen Yonge Lind.

She encouraged me to read, and helped me break the rules when the librarian at the Kaimuki Library said I was too young to venture into the adult book section.

She also gave me the best single piece of advice ever, which I later found applicable far beyond its original context.

When she finally got tired of my endless questions how to make this or that in her tiny kitchen, she finally told me: “If you can read, you can cook.”

And then she shared her cookbook, a small three-ring binder with recipes carefully typed, then revised with handwritten notes based on experience, changing quality of ingredients, etc.

Now I could look recipes up myself.

“If you can read, you can cook.”

Sage advice.

I’ve later applied that in many other areas of life. Reading is a core skill. Master it. Love it. You’ll go a long way.

This photo was taken on the back steps from the living room of my parent’s house in Kahala, leading down onto the lanai and the back yard. It’s a scene that no longer exists, because when we renovated the old house after her death, we built a back deck at the same level as the house, rather than a lanai at ground level.

In any case, I can still remember this scene, repeated many times, the anticipation when turning the crank on the little music box and waiting for the punch line, “Pop! Goes the weasel!” Somehow knowing how it was going to end didn’t take away from the pleasure I got from it each and every time.

My mother died at the end of January 2013, a few months short of her 99th birthday.