Story for the Week
My mother was never without a book. I’ve mentioned before that I got my love of reading from my mom (In Honor of Mother’s Day, a Bittersweet Mother/Daughter Story), and I would read anything. I was the kid reading the cereal box during breakfast, the soup labels during dinner, the newspaper even when I wasn’t old enough to understand what was happening in the world, and, of course, A Kiss for a Warthog (Welcome to the Adventure). I give Mom credit for setting such a great example.
When I was growing up, Mom read a lot of Harlequin romances. You know the ones—a couple on the cover looking longingly into each other’s eyes. Back in the ’70s, they were pretty innocent pictures. The men wore suits, and the women wore conservative dresses. In the ’80s and ’90s, when the likes of a shirtless Fabio graced romance novels with more scantily clad women, the covers and the text got racier. Now? Mom would never read Kate Canterbary or Melissa Foster and definitely not E.L. James (no offense, ladies—she REALLY didn’t like anything that explicit), but many of the book covers in her bedroom still had women with super tight bodices and long flowing hair.
And she wouldn’t hesitate to tell you all about what she was reading. When people ask what I’m reading, I give a pretty quick synopsis—an elevator speech, if you will. Mom could (and would) go into detail, even recounting complete conversations between the main characters. She was totally invested in the stories. I can’t count the number of times she would be mad at a character, and I would say, “Mom, it’s a book.” And she would respond with, “I know, but it just makes me so mad.”
Over the years, it became clear that our basic tastes were different. Mom was pretty well-situated in the romance genre, and I tended toward thrillers and horror. As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve started to move more into women’s and contemporary fiction. I still love a good thriller and won’t pass up a new Stephen King novel, but I find myself looking for the fun stories and the happily ever afters, the feel-good stories that may take me on an emotional roller coaster (I’m talking about you, Amanda Prowse) but don’t make me work so hard to figure out what’s going on.
Since I started blogging about books last year, Mom commented more than once on a title that I reviewed, so I started sending books to her Kindle on a pretty regular basis. We both loved You and Me and Us by Alison Hammer, but it made her cry more because she was way more emotional than I am and, well, I read it while my husband was being treated for cancer, and she read it after he passed away. She also learned to love Amanda Prowse just as much as I do, so I stocked up both of our Kindles with those.
Mom had just finished Amanda’s The Idea of You and was only seven pages into The Art of Hiding. I signed her up for Kindle Unlimited in January and had recently pushed a handful of books to her Kindle. She had a great TBR list lined up, most of them romances. I never asked her why she loved that particular genre. Maybe it was because she and Dad had their own fairy tale. They were 15 and 16 when they met. Dad worked at a carnival, and Mom happened to go to the carnival with her younger sister. She spotted a red motor scooter in the parking lot and told her sister that she was going to get a ride home on it. She had no idea who owned the scooter. She was just bragging. When she and her sister went on the Tilt-A-Whirl, Dad took their tickets and then got on the ride with them because he thought Mom was cute. She got a ride home on that red motor scooter after all.
We lost Mom unexpectedly on March 24, and April 20 would be Mom and Dad’s 58th wedding anniversary. They spent 64 years together, and theirs is a phenomenal, one-of-a-kind love story. I hope she gets to read it back and relive it when she finds the best bookstore in Heaven.
We miss you, Mom. I hope you and Dennis (For My Husband, We Miss You) are staying out of trouble. 💖
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