I've been thinking about Mom a lot in the last few days as this first anniversary has passed.  I have both her ukuleles, which I treasure. While I don't have many occasions to play them myself, I lend them out from time to time to help friends get started playing music with others. Last night was a perfect example of how satisfying this can be. One ukulelist friend, Maureen, had just borrowed the two ukes for a few days, to try out and compare with her own. She returned them to me last night, at our last practice with guitarist Simon Nyberg, a talented teacher who has been here for several months from Sweden. Another friend, Pia, came to the practice "just to listen" and enjoy a final evening with Simon. Pia loves music but has no experience with any instrument. Darned if Mom's fluke (a type of uke) didn't find its way directly from Maureen's hand into Pia's, and the next thing we knew Simon was showing Pia a simple harmony line she could pluck, and then she learned a couple of chords, and she was part of the group! Her eyes were shining with delighted surprise, and I knew just how Mom felt when she helped beginners get their feet wet making music. Pia now has the fluke and I'm sure she'll enjoy learning to make music. This was a happy way to remember Mom at this time.

I would have written almost exactly the same story as Cathy's about the good advice that we daughters received from Mom. Another of her key principles for a happy life was always to  make the best of your situation. Since our family moved rather often, this attitude included finding something to like in each new place you lived, no matter how unpromising it might seem at first. She truly believed that home was where your family was, and there was joy and beauty to be found everywhere if you looked for it. 

Mom  never preached; she just knew the right time to deliver her ideas. She influenced by example as well by talking.

As Cathy mentioned in her piece on Kit’s feelings about Nature, Kit had a very personal attitude toward religion and, in her adult years, was not a church-goer. Nonetheless, her background, from family to school to Scouting, was permeated with spiritual  values. Her firm conviction was that religion was a private matter, not a suitable topic for social conversation, and that the spiritual beliefs and activities of others must be respected.

Her attitude toward organized religion stemmed from a couple of major influences. First, she was brought up early in the Swedenborgian church. Nowadays, that small sect is an admirable model of tolerance and reason --

http://www.swedenborg.org/beliefs.cfm

But back in the 1920s, the Swedenborgian church Kit’s family attended was a different matter. As a small child in Delaware, Kit spent a lot of time with her maternal grandparents. On Sundays, she was forced to sit through long, terrifying sermons about hellfire and brimstone. Then her grandmother would read her more sermons as bedtime stories. For weeks after each visit, she would be plagued with nightmares of tormented souls swimming around in burning sulfur.

Kit’s parents were probably somewhat relieved when they moved to McCloud CA, far away from the Swedenborgian sermons. In McCloud at that time, there were only two churches, let’s call them A and B, representing two fine mainstream denominations. The Williamsons attended Church A and all seemed well. Then came Kit’s high school graduation. It was traditional for all McCloud’s graduating students to attend short services at both churches together before receiving their diplomas. The order of the services was Church A first, then Church B. As Kit told the story, the Church B folks insisted on this order because their kids needed a special blessing after their exposure to Church A’s service! I rather imagine that the two congregations coexisted happily and this insult was the farthest thing from anyone’s mind, but to Kit, it was an egregious example of petty sectarianism.

Though they did not attend church at home, Kit and Hank always tried to visit Native Hawaiian church services when they were in Hawaii. They both loved the simple sincerity of the services and the beauty of the Hawaiian church music, with its rhythmic energy, heavily influenced by 19th--century missionaries and their old-timey hymns.