Mom's visit

Mother came to visit. She called and told us she was coming for Spring Break. For my wife it meant having the house extra clean, for me it meant fresh homemade tortillas for breakfast every day! For my grand daughter, Isabelle, it meant spending more time with great grandma. She really loves her great grandma. Mom speaks only Spanish and Isabelle has a very limited Spanish vocabulary, but they do great at communicating. For my grand daughter, Lily, it meant one more person to give her food.
Mom likes to sit and talk about what our family life was like when we were growing up. She was a very good mother, had a great husband and some really good kids. My brothers and sisters gave her few headaches. I think Dora and I were the ones that gave her the bigger ones. Anyways, I would get up every day and go downstairs where she would be making tortillas. She would make me a couple of eggs and we would talk about people from our neighborhood, from school, or about our relatives. She specially like to hear about the good memories we have of our father. I few years ago I wrote a poem about him and printed it on some magnetic cards for the refrigerators. My brother Carlos translated the poem into Spanish for her. She had asked me to print the Spanish translation, I think she wanted to show it to her friends but none of them read English, but she kept insisting that it was a poem written by my brother. Anyways, I printed and framed it for her.
She likes doing work and we had to keep reminding her that she was visiting and didn't have to do work. We had a great time with her here. She doesn't like me taking close up pictures of her. She says she has too many wrinkles.
Mom married my father when she was seventeen years old. That was about the average age to get married for girls in the 40s in Mexico. My dad was twenty-two years old. They were real poor when they first got married. Eventually they did pretty good and they had a series of small store in three different town in Mexico. They had a real set back in 1954 when a flood wiped out their biggest store which they had in Piedras Negras. That forced them to move north into the USA looking for a better life. For years they worked in the fields, saving as much money as they could and buying up properties. My dad retired and they moved back to Eagle Pass in the late 80s. They bought a house with a big yard just outside Eagle Pass and had a swing set put in the front so that the grand kids could play there. The swing set is still there and now the great grand kids play on it. Dad passed away in the late 90s. Mom has always been a strong woman. She still cries every time she remembers my dad. They were married for more that 50 years. She likes listening to Mexican songs from the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. She brought me another list of songs she wants me to find on the Internet and copy for her. I gave her another Rocio Dulcar CD that I had that had songs from those decades. I tell her little about my work. She worries too much. She still hopes I get out of law enforcement and find a safer job.
Her week here went by too fast. She left with her suitcase and an H.E.B. grocery bag full of plants.