We were saddling our horses at the barn when it hit… the calm before the storm.  My Dad, brothers, and I all froze, as we looked out across the corral.

Here she came.  Her forest green hat pulled down on her dark auburn hair.  Her boots hit the ground solid—her stride was long.  The searing eyes and set of her chin made us check if smoke would come out from under her hat brim.  

“Don’t—say—anything!  I’ve got sit-i-tis.” erupted from mother.  Dad quietly caught her horse and stepped out of the way.

After years of suffering, she had finally been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis.  The doctor told her to “act like a lady”.  She even put on a dress and stayed in the house for a few days.  But now, she could no longer accept this drastic RX.  She had been riding all her life.

     Back, when she taught school in a neighboring district she forged belly deep snow-banks, fifteen miles on horseback.  It was below zero Fahrenheit, but she went to see her husband anyway.  She has also shod horses and once dug 98 deep post holes in one day, by hand. 

       At sixteen years of age she was on a bus from her ranch home in the badlands of western North Dakota headed seventeen hundred miles away to New Jersey.  It was quite a shock to live with strangers (to her) who taught her to walk with a book on her head, eat square at the table, and say "I've had an elegant sufficiency" when offered a second helping of food.  This experience while attending medical secretary school enabled her to entertain doctors and bankers with confidence, but her preference was still astride her horse at a lope. She'd check cattle one day and lope up the river to visit neighbors, some thirty miles away, the next.

     You don’t talk about illness with my mother (now in her upper 80s).  Even though she has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), rheumatoid arthritis, and sciatica you still do not talk about her illness.  She can't even remember a medicine cabinet in the house as a child.  Her grandmother (who partially raised her after her mother died) liked to be waited on in her elder years. Not my mother. 

However, she does have her grandmother's love for history.  Mother traced our linage back to the 1400’s with the assistance of her computer and microfilm.  Her beautifully graceful handwriting, that's a little shaky now, attests to the diversity in her character.  Her hands, misshapen so she tries to hide them in public, hurt enough that even typing on her computer is difficult.

Years of pain and laughter are etched deeply in her sun weathered face.  A face that once was so beautiful now has character, that's what her multitude of friends call it.  She provides a shoulder to lean on in desperation, an inspiration in doubt, or a kick in the backside when a nudge isn't enough.

Her erect five-foot four stature has settled, she can't fit into her size 10-dress, but she still wields that powerful determination as she lights into me for doing man’s work. That light is definitely still burning, and she knows not the words “give up”.