Party For The Ages Mother Has Passed On, But That Doesn’t Mean We Can’t Celebrate Her 100th Birthday

There will be fried chicken, but the birds will come in neat pieces from the supermarket, and will not require having their necks wrung or feathers plucked.

There will be sundaes, but the ice cream will come from a paper carton, not hand-cranked from a wooden freezer using whole cream and dry ice.

And there will be gunny-sack races, but only if gunny sacks are still made.

In short, it’s going to be a 1995 version of an 1895 birthday party. My mother’s birthday party. Or, rather, a celebration of her life on what would have been her 100th birthday, had she not died a dozen years ago.

Her three surviving children will be at the birthday bash along with their children and their children; there will be those who knew her and adored her, and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren who never met her. There will be cousins, nieces, nephews, friends … our ages will range from 1 to 81.

We began this celebration of my parents’ lives on the 100th anniversary of their births five years ago on what would have been my father’s 100th birthday. For that party, we rented a Grange hall, prepared a ham dinner from a century-old cookbook, trimmed the hall with decorative dried weeds from my father’s native Nebraska and hired a caller and two fiddlers to teach us folk dancing.

For these 100-year parties, I print a family history telling of my parents’ ancestors, going back as far back as possible. I search for information to make the grandparents come alive, something to let us know who they were, how they lived, what their surroundings were like physically and politically.

Family members and friends are asked to write memories of my folks for the books, so future generations can know about them, who they were, how they lived their lives, what obstacles they overcame - like living through the Great Depression when the only work my father could find was selling newspaper subscriptions in exchange for eggs, and how my 97-pound mother worked so hard in a meat-packing company to support the family.

Future readers will learn how these people were loved and respected.

And, through their reading, maybe they will learn a little more about who they are, why their noses are shaped the way are, whom to “blame” for their slightly bowed legs, why they might attend the church they do. They’ll learn that the Smiths have been Baptists since before the Civil War.

They’ll learn the Wing side of their family was among the country’s first citizens who traded allegiances to become Canadians after the American Revolution, who migrated back to the States in the mid-1800s, only to become nearly decimated during a yearslong drought that led them to emigrate back to Canada - this time Alberta - and finally back to the States one more time in the 1920s.

But, most importantly, I want my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to gain a “personality” glimpse of my dad and mom - Lindley Murray Smith Jr. and Genevieve Amanda (Wing) Smith.

I want them to know how dearly my mother was loved by legions of people, and not just her family; how generations of children from the neighborhood and the church called her Grandma. How she treasured the garden-variety rocks they brought her as gifts and how she displayed them in her china closet as proudly as she did her cups of fine china.

I want them to know how many decades she taught Sunday school and how many Sunday dinners she cooked for ministers’ families, and that “service boys” from Fairchild Air Force Base were invited to share roast beef dinners around her table that always had room for one more.

I want them to appreciate how many years of holiday meals she prepared for her family, how many scores of mittens she knit for her grandchildren, how many hundreds of dozens of cookies she baked for them.

I want them to know that Genevieve Amanda (Wing) Smith was a woman they can be proud to claim in their family tree, that she lived a life of hurts and joys, that she survived the death of a son in her middle age and her husband in her old age, that she never complained about not having the latest or the best in fashion.

I want them to know she didn’t expect a lot out of this world, but that she contributed much to it. That, as they say, she bloomed where she was planted.

She’ll not be remembered in any history book but, nevertheless, she made a great difference in this world. It is a better place because of her.

I hope Aug. 19 this summer will be a hot, sunny day, one in which you can get “as brown as a berry” like she did. I hope we will have a park full of people who knew her and who will want to spend the day remembering her and telling one another “Grandma Smith stories.”

I hope there will be lots of little kids giggling as they awarkedly try to run a course with one leg tied to another person’s in a three-legged race. I hope some people will come dressed as picnickers might have 100 years ago.

I hope we reflect on all that has changed in the world, our country, our family since Aug. 20, 1895, when she was born in a farm house in Madison, Lake, S.D.

I hope at the end of the day, our stomachs will ache from eating too much fried chicken, potato salad, raisin-and-nut spice cake, watermelon, ice cream sundaes. …

And, I hope, in another hmmmph years, my family will gather together and celebrate my 100th birthday, either with or without my physical presence. I know my mother’s spiritual presence will be with us at our picnic, and that’s almost as good as the real thing.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Staff illustration by Molly Quinn