Mom

Today was Prince Charles' 65th birthday. It would have been my mom's 80th birthday. She told me the story when I was around 20 of how she remembered when he was born. She was a teenager, and at the time she said it was pretty cool that he was born on her birthday.

Bonnie Prince Charles

Anne McDougal

The picture I took of her above was from 1982. We were on a road trip from my hometown of Kalamazoo Michigan to her hometown of Rochester New York.

I had earned a one week vacation from the job I had, and one of the main events of the trip for my mom was to go to her 25th high school reunion. After the reunion we headed to Vermont and New Hampshire. We were driving in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, which is a little ways southeast of Rochester, and came across this sign.

We immediately pulled over and got out and I got this shot of mom, we could not resist! It was a fun trip; I saw Lake Champlain for the first time, and we went all the way to the Atlantic coast in New Hampshire.

She took a solo trip to Nova Scotia the summer I took driver's ed in high school. I might post about that some other time, I have her pictures and other items from that trip. At her memorial service after she died in 1985, one of her friends told me how brave she felt my mom was at the time to make a trip like that, very independent.

It's something I think about in relation to when she and dad divorced. She said that part of why he left her was that he felt like she wasn't growing enough as a person. And I thought the irony is that after getting divorced I think she actually grew a lot. She and dad were both very smart, well read and into the arts, I'm thankful that I had that environment to grow up in.

Mom 1979

My mom's best friend Nancy Jackson Jones took this picture at the beach on Lake Michigan. She always tanned so beautifully, I wished I had inherited that. I expected my hair to go salt & pepper like hers since I had found my first gray hair at 21, but it was not to be. Like I said before though, I am the product of my parents; I got dad's height and her legs ♥

Mom on honeymoon 1956

Mom 3 or 4 years old