Mother's Letters...and Mine

It was a Norman Rockwell sort of life…for a time. Harry Holt, an Oregon farmer, went to Korea and saw the need for an adoption agency. Mother had a need for more children. When the Holts and mother got together fireworks happened. It was a time of joy, of gratitude, of happy Christmases, of picnics, of first grades and second and thirds, until disaster struck. Flowers on the cover, for Mom. Zinnias, an old fashioned flower. They remind me of her. Here’s to you mom.

Wouldn’t it be something if mother, a small voice from the past, a farm-woman sitting at her kitchen table pouring out her heart on paper in thankfulness and gratitude for the children she adopted could in some manner impact the world? The time was 1956. Mother wrote to Grandma Holt of the Holt agency off and on until 1967 when the letters stopped. The agency kept her letters all those years and then sent them to my step-dad. I typed them, placed them here between the covers of this book, and added some of my own. The reason? There was a secret in the family that mother never knew. Telling it could be a legacy for her, and for my sister Jan. .

This story takes place in the little town of The Dalles Oregon where I grew up. There my mother adopted her three children, and there she wrote these letters. Mother has been gone for some 45 years. I moved away from my home town, circled the Pacific Rim for many years, and am now I’m back in Oregon—Eugene this time. As one might expect, when we read a person’s private thoughts we learn more about them than they ever revealed in conversation, or in day to day living. And so it was for me when I read mother’s letters. Her voice was one of honesty, of thankfulness and of sharing the joys and tribulations of little ones growing up. I added my own letters to her's, for there was a subject she and I never addressed.