by Leon Deloach Deborde
There is silence now. The silence that comes to a sick-room in the very early hours of the morning, when street noises have ended for the brief lull before the early morning traffic again heralds the approach of a new day.
As I sit here beside my mother, the thought comes to me that I have been granted a rare privilege, that I at my age may be able to give some small comfort and service to one who has striven so long and so well, to provide and care for so many of us.
She never was robust or had the advantage of being in any way athletically endowed. She is scarcely five feet in height, her arms are slightly malformed and delicate, her shoulders narrow, yet tho her body might always have been called frail, she always drove it by superhuman effort to stand between her young ones and danger, between them and hunger, between them and cold and all the things in sickness and in health, that threatened them thru their formative years. She has suffered the privations, the hardships, the heartbreak that most pioneer women experienced in a greater or less degree.
Did I say heartbreak? Never has her heart or her spirit or her faith broken, for never on her most wearisome day, save during sickness or sorrow did there fail to be a song in her heart and on her lips when the day was done.
Patience and Faith. Patience that let her pull a piece of cloth thr the hole in the bottom of the wash-tub, so that its usefulness could be stretched for a few days or weeks longer before being necessary to meet the formidable cost of a new one. The tub she would use in which to heat the water she would carry from the spring to bathe the children, and with the addition of a wash-board would constitute her laundry facilities for next day's wash, the family washing that might be augmented by rough clothing of miners, taken in for the extra sorely needed dimes she could earn by the simple expedience of rubbing her knuckles up and down on a wash-board -- knuckles already sore and tender from lye in the soft-soap she made in her spare time. If only she could have known power outlets, push buttons and water faucets.
Faith that sustained her through the years to bear ten children without benefit of hospitals or doctors, to raise every one to maturity, her baby feeding formula as old as or older than human life itself upon this earth. The faith that told her, without conscious thought on her part, that if she did the things that came to her hand, those things beyond her reach would be cared for by proper forces on earth and in heaven.
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