Mom is 100 today!

 
Today is my Mother's 100th birthday. 

Estelle has outlived her husband and all of her sisters.
She always said that she wanted to live to be 100 and she made it.

She was 18 in the photo upper left, and there she is with her parents and sisters. She was the oldest of the girls.

Here's Mom in 2008, she was seeing me off at the Van Nuys bus terminal where I was taking the bus to LAX to catch a flight home.  She's changed a bit from her 18 year old portrait but still smiling!








And here's mom in 2010, knitting scarves. She knit sooo many that we could hardly keep her in yarn. 

She knit, she sewed clothing, she was a voracious reader.

Here's one of my favorite childhood memories - I may have mentioned this before. We walked to the Legler branch of the Chicago library, which was only a little over a mile from our apartment, but to me, as a child it was so far away. To keep my attention on our goal,  my mother would say "we're going to get free books, isn't that wonderful?" And on the way back, with me carrying a couple of books under my arm, more in my sister's carriage, she'd say "Aren't we lucky, we've got free books to read?" Later, I'd walk by myself or with friends, always thinking how lucky I was to be able to have free books to read. And guess what? I'm a voracious reader, something that I've passed along to my own children. Thanks, Mom.