She would sit in her chair devouring yet another book when suddenly the back screen door would bang shut. She slams her book closed and jumps up from the chair and hurries to the kitchen to cook, once again trying not to reveal to her husband the ‘idle’ time she has just spent reading . . . again.
Lydia loved to read. As a little girl, she would walk the many blocks of Great Falls to the library getting book after book to read. When she married a man, also of German heritage, she moved over 200 miles away from her city life to a farm in rural Montana. A farm that eventually turned into a 30,000 head chickenfarm. A farm that consumed their days.
And yet her reading, and eventually her writing, remained her personal love.
She took those colorful words that she absorbed and jotted versions of them on pieces of scratch paper as snippets or even full paragraphs to use for a later writing. She attended writing classes. She wrote more.
And then one time she submitted a piece to a publication, hoping to possibly get published and acknowledged. Like so many writers, it was declined. And sadly, that was the end of that. She no longer would submit her work and allow getting rejected ever again.
And yet the scratch paper ideas mounted up, getting filed by topic or…just getting filed but never thrown away. As first and second generation Germans, she wrote about both hers and her husband, Pepper’s, ancestry and migration to the ‘new world’.
She eventually became the unofficial Stillwater County historian, interviewing and writing about communities and people and even acting as director of the budding county museum. If she got paid, it was only a token.
Lydia O. is the pen name she chose. Olga was her German middle name – she hated it - but found it unique enough to tag it onto her name for her pen name.
She now sits in a nursing home consumed by that ugly disease called Alzheimer’s and can’t remember a drop of what she so ravenously wrote about. She can’t even remember she was a writer.
THE POINT OF THE POST IS: As I become more and more exposed to many blogs, different interests and styles of writing via the internet,
I think about how my mother would have embraced a blog site of her own to release those thoughts and ideas that continually bounced around in her head.
Methinks she was born abour 30 years too early. And what a gift it would have been to my silblings and children and grandchildren to have.
So, I dedicate my Alphabe-Thursday submission to my mother, Lydia O., the writer in my family.
(P.S. I have the bittersweet task of going through the massive house she lived in for 60 years and deciding what to do with not only the antiques (collected before antiques were fashionable) and family heirlooms brought from the ‘old country’ but also all those snippets.)
Do check in at Jenny's blog and find tons of other fascinating "L" post for Alphabe-Thursday. It gets better and better with each week! It is a world-wide depiction of how diverse not only the internet is but also how diverse God's precious people are!
Enjoy! (thus ends the advertisement for this week!) :)
