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On September 29, 1948 a little girl was born into the Speer family, in a quaint, brick hospital in upstate New York. Potsdam, NY could be the backdrop for a Norman Rockwell painting, complete with white picket fences and oak lined streets. This little girl, with glossy brown hair that fell at a sharp line against her freckle spattered cheeks, would grow up to be my mother.


I imagine she was rather an impish child, and terrorized her two older sisters who were about to leave the large, comfortable house, for the lure of school and adventure. For awhile my mom's life was idyllic, filled with family, country club dances and promise. I wish I could say her childhood continued that way, but tragedy and heartache marked much of her younger years. She did not live the childhood all children should have...the one she eventually gave my sister and I. And yet, somehow, she grew up to be a beautiful, social, intelligent young woman.

Her studies brought her to SUNY Morrisville, where she met a pack of young, rangy, disorganized males...and she rounded them up and helped look after them. One of these guys with disheveled, thinning, blond hair somehow caught her eye and heart. This young man from the heart of industrial New York was about as far from a Norman Rockwell painting as you could get. Little did she know that this young, coal shoveling, summer employee from the city, was actually a mountain man looking for a way back west. And so an unlikely pairing and marriage began...one that at last count was looking at 40 years together. The "tracks of the Puchlerz's" as my mom has coined it, took her far from Potsdam and the life I'm sure she and her family imagined she'd live.
This small town, country club gal has called 6 of the wildest states in the union, home...and she's worked in every one. I know my mother was employed while I grew up, and yet I can not recall a time that she wasn't there to greet me in the morning or evening, or missed a school event my sister and I participated in. If a parent was needed to volunteer, my mother was there to meet the request. I'm quite certain I inherited my need for organization and schedules from her. My mother is a general when it comes to the "To Do" list. And although she needs these actions to feel good about her day, she allowed me to make my own schedules and goals growing up. And from one control freak to another, I am only recently beginning to understand how hard this must of been for her. I look back at the life that my sister and I were given, and I can't imagine how I would of handled the factors that my mom faced growing up. She may worry a bit much about all of us, and we may not always understand the rhyme and reason to her processes and filing systems, but I do know she goes through her day thinking about her family and friends.

So mom...I know I do not say it often enough...or probably even think it enough...Thank You. Thank You. Thank You. Happy Birthday. I love and miss you. I wish I could be there to join in the festivities, but know that I'm thinking of you.