After a long hiatus . . .

Yeah, I've been AFK on this blog since before the holidays. Those holidays, by the way, were great -- two weeks in Tucson, staying with my sister and visiting my elderly mother. After returning and a flurry in which January passed almost imperceptibly, I got the news that my mother had passed away. Not unexpected, I suppose -- she was 97 and getting feeble, and had recently fallen and fractured a hip, with no repair surgery possible. Hospice, then death, with my two siblings and a niece at her bedside. I came the next day, stayed a week to help my sister plan and attend the funeral, seeing an influx of relatives I do my best to remain in touch with, but rarely see.

It's a cliche these days to say that you're "celebrating" the life of someone no longer in your life, and behind every cliche is a fragment of truth. Francis Marilyn "Molly" Buck Hitchens was born in 1920. Her family survived the depression with little money but fortunate to be in the bosom of an extended family living in central Illinois, a very fertile part of the country, so there was always plenty of food, nothing like the "dust bowl." Back in Chicago she married my father on the eve of World War II and then became one of America's million camp followers as he went from one duty station and training base to another.

After the war the family was again in Chicago for about five years, then the Air Force beckoned, my father having stayed active in the reserves. Living in Texas, Florida, California, Virginia, Colorado, Virginia again, then (after my father's retirement) Pittsburgh, and Aurora Illinois, where my father died. Molly then accompanied my sister and her husband to Tucson, which is as good a final resting place as any. She raised four children and was survived by three of us. I wrote a respectable obituary, and I know she touched a lot of lives with her straightforward, unadorned Christian faith that surely sustained her at the end. Molly, may God rest your deserving soul.