Tears on a new pair of pants

 I think there is a reason some words are homographs, like the tears, and tears.  Often the tears we have are from tears of the heart.  In this case, the tears are from missing my mother.
My mom has been gone for 2.5 years. She died from a ATV accident on the farm.The ATV rolled and it crushed her liver. She died in the hospital after they were unable to stop the bleeding. I miss her more than words can say. Time doesn't heal but time does allow less crushing grief.  Most days I think of her at some point.  I don't cry every day, but some time the events from the day will bring the tears on. Usually the events these events are really a small event. Yes, I miss her on birthdays and holidays, I miss her for "important" things. I cried hysterically when I gave birth to my daughter, so much that the Dr. asked if I was okay. My mom will never meet Cadence Louise (my mom's name was Louise), on this earth. What often brings on the tears are the seemingly minute day to day events.  Those moments are what make me miss her the most.
A couple years ago, when I turned 30, I froze corn on my birthday. I cried that day, not because I missed my mom on my 30th birthday, but because I couldn't call her and tell her I had froze over 100 cups of corn. I know how to do this because she taught me.
Yesterday I cried over a pair of pants.  My oldest son, Zorryn, has recently hit a growth spurt. He needs new pants, but he is still skinny. All the pants I can buy that are longer, are also too large in the waist and just fall down.  He doesn't want to wear jeans, which have the adjustable waist, but only wants "comfy pants".  To solve this problem I resorted to a skill that I haven't used since high school. I am sewing him pants.  I took home-ec in high school so the skills have been learned and I still sew quilts, but I have not sewn clothing in many years.  The vital piece of information in this post, is that my mother was an excellent sew-er. She taught home - ec and taught me how to sew. Growing up, many of my own cloths were lovingly made by my mother. My graduation dress from Grade 12 was made by her. 
As I started this project for my son, I was wishing I could call my mom. Ask her so many questions; would this pattern work for this fabric? How do you finish the edge? Can I make them a small but with the length of a medium? AND the most important question; If what I make doesn't turn out, could you make some pants for your grandson? Of course I could not ask these questions and no pants would be showing up in the mail. I HAD TO DO THIS AND SUCCEED!
Long story short, I pinned, I cut, I sewed, I tried them on the boy, he liked them and wore them to school today. He was happy and proud of me. I was sad and proud of me.  Now that the project was finished and I had succeeded, I wanted to call my mom and hear her say "good job, I knew you could do it. Aren't you glad I made you learn how to sew".   And so, in a round about way, my son got a pair of pants from his grandmother, and because of that there were tears on the new pair of pants.

The jingle of two generations

When I was a baby I was given a Happy Apple toy.  Fisher Price still makes them too! I think the story goes that I was sick and in the hospital. My brother, Kelly,  and my dad were coming in to see me and stopped at the hardware store and Kelly picked out this apple to bring to me.  I think I was 18 months or something like that.I must have liked it because the eye has been partially scraped off by my teeth and the stem of the apple is about half of what it was because I did chew it off!
It also survived a house fire! My mom would sort our toys into bins and would store some of them in the outside shed, rotating the boxes so we would get a new batch of toys every so often and not get bored with the toys and start fighting with each other. In 1990 our trailer house burned down.  Many things were lost but no one was hurt. Things can be replaced, people can't.  We did have some things that were saved, all the photo albums, some family heirlooms that my dad grabbed for my mom, my moms mending basket (the albums we grabbed because of our fire plan, everything else was random). We also had the toys and items stored in the shed.  This apple was out there, probably because all of us were too old to play with it anymore.
 
When I had my own kids it was given back to me so my own kids could play with it.  Yes, this apple is at least 30 years old, depending on how old I was when I first received it! Inside the apple it has one of those Chinese hand exercise balls that rings a pleasant note when it is rolled. My two boys didn't really play with it as babies, but my daughter has taken to playing with it (smile)! Something little and silly, but it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to see her playing with something that was mine.  I hear the jingle as she plays with it and smile when I hear her talking to the face of the apple. It also makes me dream "maybe someday we (my daughter and I) will pass the Happy Apple onto her children and continue the generational jingle.

Cadence with the Happy Apple, see my teeth marks on the eye!