Yesterday I received a wonderful gift from my mother: a clipping of an article from the Christian Science Monitor which she'd written in 1953. In the article she described how she'd bought and trained a budgie to take to her grandparents on a visit from her apartment in New York to their Seattle cottage. During the long train journey across the US, passengers took a shine to the parakeet as she tried to teach it to speak. 'Cheerie' refused - until he arrived at Grandma's house, settled in, and began to sing "I love you Grandma" and "I'm Hughie's bird".
I'd been down in the dumps that day. June's upon us, and that's when I switch out of writer to childcare expert and chief play wizard. I hadn't got as much published as I'd hoped in the previous nine months, and couldn't understand what I'd achieved. Mom's article cheered me up, particularly her large vocabulary and her clear style. I remembered how she took such great care to teach me interesting and difficult words, and to pronounce them correctly. I know that my large vocabulary, easily handled, has to be due to this childhood training, as well as our daily study of the King James Bible and Science and Health - a book with tortuous and awesomely difficult words for a child.
After reading Mom's letter, I opened my email to doggedly face the work I felt I'd failed at, and wonderfully there - an acceptance! The Christian Science Monitor had taken a piece I wrote about our trip to Tuscany. As I looked again at Mom's article, I noticed publication day was May - the same month as my acceptance.
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