Mother's Day 2026

This is my Mother's Day Card to my Mother Mary Lavinia Wright, passed away to the Universal Consciusness in 2000 accompanied by the Leonid Showers, and to my Grandmothers Lavinia Lyons and Mabel Wright.

My mother, Mary, was beautiful, generous, kind and warm. She smelled like baking cookies and she wore 4711 Cologne. She was a vivid and vigorous person with many friends. My sister and I often reminisce about how much fun it was to stay home from school sick and listen to my Mom and her girlfriends from the new development cul de sac as they sat in their curlers and house dresses and smoked their Salems, ate Steve the Breadman's delivered donuts and drank coffee from the cheerfully burbling big silver percolator in the dining room of our house on Roland Avenue. My Mother painted ceramics on Main Street with her girlfriends and she made us elephants and pumpkins and Christmas trees that had little plastic birds that lit up from a bulb inside the tree. She was in the Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion Women's Auxiliary, and she ran the fund raiser church suppers for St. John's Episcopal Church. My mother was a devout Episcopalian. She loved babies and had 5 of her own. She loved keeping house and made her curtains and drapes and upholstered her furniture. I especially thank my mother for all the books she bought me for holidays and all the magazines to which she subscribed and all they taught me about the world, photography, art, and writing.

Every day after school she was in the kitchen peeling carrots and potatoes and snapping beans and peas. In those days everything came as it was when it was grown. We often sat together and split pods to releaase the peas. As a special treat for my father, my mother would make rubarb pie in season. Awful gelatinous and fibrous stuff we thought, but my father loved it. My mother honored my father and put out a big meal on the Dining Room Table for him every night and reminded us of how hard he worked to provide for us. In return my father thanked my mother for the wonderful meal she made for us.

One year at Christmas my mother made a traditional plum pudding and set it ablaze! She made fish cakes from dried salted cod that came in wooden boxes, and she ground left over ham and made croquets. She was a hearty and enthusiatic cook. She made each child a favorite birthday cake. Mine was black walnut pound cake.

They had a good marriage, my parents. My mother was all forgiving and one of her sayings was "IF all were known, all would be forgiven." My father was amused by my mother and devoted to family living. They had both been orphaned and had Depression era poverty in their childhood. My mother had to quit high school to go to work to bring in money to help the family. She had been adopted by her aunt Lavinia along with her sister Sarah. Her other sister, Betty had been adopted by another family and the three sisters, to my knowledge, were never reunited. So much of my mother's early childhood is lost. Her Aunt Lavinia, whom she called Mom and we called Grandmom, was reticent to a notable degree and wouldn't tell me anything about my mother's biological mother or father. And if pressed she made up stories such as that they died in a car accident. They did not. Why Sarah's husband put their little girls in an orphanage is lost to time, but perhaps as a lone man, he just couldn't cope. We had no contact or information from his family. My Grandmother cut them off if they ever tried to visit the girls. His name was Levy Goldy and hers was, of course, Sarah Goldy.

Lavinia Lyons was always, in my memory a somewhat sad and dreamy woman. She spent all her time in the house cleaning and cooking. Her house was spotless. She had black flocked wallpaper with red satin roses on it in her Victorian parlour, and a Victorian sofa. There was a piano which Grandpop played, a club chair and a curio cabinet with some china in it. The chocolate pot from that cabinet is in the curio cabinet in my house, a house warming gift because I loved it.

Lavinia had also been orphaned in her childhood and she and her sister, Sarah had been raised by their Grandparents, the McQuistons. Lavinia and Sarah had been Garwoods. Their father William C. Garwood had been a drinker, allegedly, who had visited his grandaughters in the orphanage. My mother remembered him smelling of alcohol, with a large mustache and a bag of candy. I was told that Lavinia was heartbroken that the girls had to stay in the "Friendless Children's Home" in Camden, New Jersey, until she could marry and adopt them. She married Joseph Lyons, a gentle, soft spoken, kind and patient man, who had been in World War I on the Mexican border. He worked as a postman. They had an Irish setter named King! And they had a small garden where King and Grandpop took refuge when necessary from my Grandmom Lavinia who, apparently, was given to occasional short spurts of irritable temper. Also Grandpop chain smoked hand rolled cigarettes he kept in a cigar box and I think the smoke and the prized Irish lace curtains were a source of trouble. Those curtains had to be hand washed and stretched out on wooden frames lined with straight pins, to dry. The other bane of my gradmother's existence was the parade of black ants that periodically marched, single file into her back kitchen along a counter below a window. I remember her cursing them. She had a mouse who peeked out a hole in the cellar doorway, but they seemed to have a detente although I was warned to wash pots and pans before use just in case of mouse droppings. Grandmom Lavinia had one child who died, a Joanne, and three children who lived, Joseph, Susan, and Lavinia. I grew up with them. They are all dead now.

Two quick memories of Grandmom Lyons are of accompanying her into the back allMy mother reey to buy produce from the huckster with his horse drawn wagon, who came from "Down the Neck" an ancient neighborhood of reclaimed swamp turned into small farms farther South of our neighborhood. Another memory is of Grandmom eating "Pigs feet" in a cube of jelly with Aunt Bee. Aunt Bee was from around the Block, the Adams/Welsh part of the maternal Irish ancestry branch pf the family and famous for their ancient and fairly threadbare parrot who could talk and often called "Peggy!" He also wolf whistled at young women walking along the sidewalk when he was on the porch. I was always warned not to put a finger in his cage because he was a biter.

Another slight memory is of a weather house that sat in the ceiling corner of my grandmother's porch, and when we sat on the porch, we could look to see if the man with the umbrella was out to show us rain or the milkmaid in her blue skirt to show fair weather. I have one of those of my own in my kitchen ceiling corner.

I want to thank this Grandmother especially for the books she gave me from her book case in the basement. There I received Tarzan, all of Dickens, all of Twain, the Outdoor Girls on a Hike and a selection of Great European authors such as Boccacio and deMauppasant.

Grandmom Mabel came from a German family, also from Philadelphia, and she and her mother were seamstresses and made a living from their sewing. During the Depression and preeeding and during World War !, they took in piece work and sewed uniforms for the Schuylkill Aresenal. My Grandmother Mabel made quilts; it wa her hobby and her art, and I suspect her meditation. She was a Catholic and she gave me her crucifix with its compartment behind the figure of Jesus for holy water and a candle. I gave this precious relic to my Cousin Patty who is Catholic and we both loved our Grandmother Mabel so deeply.

Mabel worked on the Boardwalk in Ocean City selling tickets to the Merry Go Round from a little sentry box. She lived at 6th and Asbury Avenue, renting a second floor apartment from her sister Emma who owened the building. She had moved there to take care of their mother, Catherine Sandman, who had suffered a catastophic stroke and was copetely paralyzed and bed ridden. For fourteen years my Grandmother took perfect care of her mother, kept her clean, smelling fresh, and dressed in lovingly knitted booties and embroidered satin bed jackets under a hand made colorful quilt. I was able to sit and visit with this GreatGrandmother in my early childhood. She had the best bedroom, in the front of the apartment facing the firehouse, from which, at the ringing of the bell in the tower, under which, a red roaring fire truck would come hurtling on its way to save a building on fire somewhere. We all rushed to the window to see the firetruck racing out onto the street!

I remember one breakfast when my grandmother let me go to the basement and fill the coal scuttle from the coal bin (which everyone had in those days of coal heat) and bring it up and use the little shovel to pour coal into the fiery mouth of the pot bellied stove that heated the kitchen. We sat at a little table nearby and I remember she had sectioned my grapefruit for me and gave me a grapefuit spoon to eat it. Also, I remember playing old maids card game with her and I remember her laughing. She found me amusing, but I can't remember why. She was a woman amused by life though it hadn't been easy on her. She had been widowed in her thirties with three sons to raise and her niece, the daughter of Emma, her sister. Emma's husband didn't like the lttle girl so Grandmom Mabel took her and raised her. Emma's married name was deFusco. After Great Grandmom died, Emma raised the rent and my Grandmther had to leave her little apartment. She moved to a couple of others before her sons bought her a house at 10th and Bay Avenue where she lived until her heart attack in her 80's. She tried living with her sons but there was a problem with the wives or the children and it never worked out. Then she had another heart attack and ended up in Evergreen Nursing home in Woodbury for 2 years until she died. Life is unfair; she who had lovingly cared for her mother for 14 years had to die alone among strangers; I visited her after work once or twice a week and read to her the updates on her soap operas from the newspaper. It still makes me cry.

I want to thank her for her cheer and her stoic way of facing up to everything. And I thank her for her gentleness and her delight in my company. I loved her quiet, orderly, tidy little house and the peace and quiet set an example for me. She was an independent woman who made her own way in the world and lived a small gracious life without being dependent on anyone, a free woman. She belonged to the Democratic Women's Club, the Village Movie Club, and the League of Women Voters.

The Grandmother I never met, Sarah, I send out my warm heart waves to her; she died so young, only 25, and left her three little girls. It must have been so hard for her. I have her photo and she looks so young and frail.

To all these women and the ones who came before them and all the hard times they faced and the good lives they made for themselves and their children, I remember you and honor you and thank you this year on mother's day and every year and every day!

Love, your descendant, a mother also wrightj45@yahoo.com