97 Years Old!

On Sunday the 16^th of September 2001, my mother Frances Kelley Hogg turned 97. She was born in 1903 in Virginia. Her dad ran a general store for a while. I remember seeing faded black and white pictures of the red brick house with a wrap around porch that she grew up in. When she was young her parents moved to the Oxford/Reading area of Pennsylvania and bought a farm. Many years later as kids we would go down and spend many summer weeks on that farm. The farm life was tough. My mother told me that she only had one dress and her mom would wash, iron and mend it each night for the next day's school. She had a horse she rode to school and pictures I've seen of her in her youth makes me think there were many boys chasing after that horse. After school she went into teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in the south. A few years of that and then she went back to the farm. My dad courted her for some time and they married and had 6 kids. The oldest, a daughter Johanna died at the age of 12, an event my mother still remembers with deep quiet pain to this day. Johanna died many years before I was born. I am the youngest of five boys. All of the boys turned out well, most involved with computers early on. It must have come from my mother's side because my father couldn't tune a lawn mower much less work a computer. Several years ago I made an apartment for her in my home here on the lake and she moved in. She spends her days enjoying the yard and the garden. A stroke several years ago took away her ability to speak but everything else is sharp as a tack. She is on no medicine and is in very good health. On this last Labor Day weekend her great great grandchildren visited us. Jeffrey and Robert. Robert is 2 and that makes him 95 years younger than Mom.

I spent several hours thinking about all the things she has seen in her 97 years. From the Model A to men on the moon. From that one-room schoolhouse to the skyscrapers of today. From the horror of World War I to the horror of the World Trade Center.

Many things change and yet nothing changes.

Frank Hogg
9/17/01