MOM MAKES IT HOME

Appropriately enough, this coming Mother’s Day weekend, many of us Hubbards will be moving my, or more accurately…our…Mom from the apartment building, which she has been living in for the past twenty-one years, to an apartment in a Senior Citizen’s Housing unit. I guess, at 90 years old, she felt that it was maybe okay for her to move in with the “old fogeys” now, (a group that she had never been previously a part of, mind you).


If you can imagine, in all of her 90 years of living, the longest length of time that Mom has ever lived under one roof has been in the apartment in Medicine Hat that she is now moving out of. It wasn’t something that her parents or she and Dad had really planned out, I think, but various circumstances dictated that both families moved around a lot.

You know, there’s an old idiom, “Home is where you lay your hat” and to some degree it’s true but sometimes apartments, or houses, or even farm yards can be your home long after you’ve moved on. Other people may even be living where you used to live, or there might not be anything left on the land where your house used to be, but the memories of when it was your home still make it so. As I was growing up and living with Mom and Dad and my siblings from the age of zero to eighteen-plus years of age we lived in four different residences in four different towns and I have many vivid and happy memories of them all. As long as Mom and the rest of my family were there it was home.

Of course Mom’s current place is full of possessions and trinkets and many things which produce a flood of memories but it’s her voice and her smell and the taste of her food that make it MOM’s place. It will not be easy for Mom to leave “her place” but I am sure that in a very short time her new place will feel like our family’s home once again.

Appropriately enough, again, it just happens to be a coincidence that my own little family has been living in our house the same number of years that Mom has lived in her apartment. So, my children’s Mom, my wife, has made this house her home and our kids and their kids are coming home to her voice and her smell and her cooking…to our home as the circle of life continues.

For Mother’s Day, in lieu of the usual quotation to finish this column, I found a little poem:

The heart of a home is a mother

Whose love is warm and true,

And home has always been "sweet home"

With a wonderful mother like you!