My mother was an explorer with many interests. She was a passionate reader with a love of books that was more than 3 score and 10 years long. She was a teacher in the formal sense and also in the more intimate and personal sense that much of her live was an example of a life well lived; an example that I would hope to follow.
She loved her family deeply and was pained when my brothers and I fought with each other, as we frequently did when we were growing up. I clearly remember one fight that Loren and I had that reduced her to tears of frustration and disappointment, and I am sure there must have been many more. These were not the things she held in her memory though. Many years later I asked if she recalled what Loren and I were fighting about that time when she left the house on Aumond Road in Augusta, so she could go cry in peace. She claimed to not remember the event at all and tried to assure me that it never happened.
She had life long interests and passions and other interests she explored very fully before moving on the next interest: Once, she and her good friend Judy Sundberg (the mother of my best elementary school friend) decided that they needed to learn to make butter mint candies. They got slabs of polished marble that lived in the refrigerator, when they were not in use for cooling hot candy. I learned the difference between "hard ball" and "soft ball" from watching (and maybe helping) Sarah and Judy in their candy production. She became interested in weaving and for many years there was a large 16 harness loom in her houses. I think that I may still have a few bags of yarn left from this part of her life. We still use some large sitting cushions she made. She developed an interest in theraputic massage and went back to school to learn this skill: for a while her loom and her massage table were traveling companions during several house moves.
There were some interests that she always loved. She loved to read books; she loved the idea of books; she loved sharing books; she loved maintain and organize books; she loved to read books to her children and grandchildren; she loved to read something funny to her husband or any one else around, but she was not good at keeping a straight face while she did so. She loved to laugh and loved to laugh with others. For a while after she agreed to give me her car keys and to stop driving, whenever I saw her she would hold out her hand, smile and chuckle, and ask for her car keys. She was fiercely helpful: demanding (and getting) a job in the Oak Ridge TN library as a high school student; volunteering in various school libraries; going to graduate school so she could be a professional helper in the social work field; teaching English to recent immigrants; helping to design and run a part of the social program at a new assisted living facility; inspecting nursing homes for the state of Virginia.
She always loved being outdoors walking. This could be as simple as a walk around the large and steep block in Seven Devils where her house was; the hope was to see rabbits in some of the open and wooded areas she passed through. Or it could be as complicated as a three day family backpacking along the Appalachian trail from Wesser to Fontana in North Carolina, with her husband and three sons in the seven to thirteen year old range. She loved the idea of female company in her house. Our family pets were always female and named after strong characters in Tolkien books, and were companions on many outdoor walks. Perhaps 12 years after our family had moved from Augusta, and just after I had been hired to the faculty at Appalachian, I passed through Augusta and visited the Sundbergs. Judy told me that a few years earlier she had gotten a hankering to go on an outward bound course: the only person who she could think of to go with was my mother, Sarah Williams.
She enjoyed cooking and eating what she and others cooked. When I was maybe in the fourth or fifth grade she perfected a recipe for very thin, lacy, slightly soft oatmeal cookies that I could not get enough of. I wish I knew what her recipe was. She loved coffee and loved to visit with her BFF, from Richmond, Martha Mabey, where they would enjoy coffee and conversation often about books. When dementia was just beginning to take her slowly away from us, she lived with Aaron and Helen and I for a few months. The progress of her disease at that time made her a bit manic, so I would make de-caff coffee for her in the mornings, and regular coffee for me. She was pretty clear about NOT appreciating this help…. I have some excellent, full strength, regular, Bald Guy coffee to send her off with today.
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