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by Sue Orsen Oldest of seven children of Joe and Betty Claeys, Ghent, MN And so Allan and I were sitting at Mom and Dad’s kitchen table in their Texas home down near the Rio Grande. It was March of 2011. We flew there for Dad’s 86th birthday. Yes, today he is 89 years old. Dad was born to Louis and Elizabeth Claeys at Ghent, Minnesota, on March 5th, 1925, the second of three sons. I came to know every nook and cranny in that Texas home, having visited often over the last two decades, up until the very year my parents decided to sell that home at the Alamo Country Club. It was built for them in 1994 and they said goodbye to it in 2012. It wasn’t easy for Mom to give up that home. Home is where the heart is, you know, and a mother’s heart is in the home. It wasn’t easy for us kids to see it go either. That last time I visited my parents on the Rio Grande, the four of us -- Dad, Mom, Allan, and I -- were sitting at their kitchen table and Dad says, “Look at Mom’s hands.” That’s how it started. We looked at Mom’s hands. She lays them out on the table in front of herself, massages the bumps, touches the discolored purple patches, tries to rub out the wrinkles but they come right back. Then Mom props up the misshapen hands on her elbows, like two pieces of sculpture in a museum. We look at the hands. “They’ve done a lot of work,” she says, neither bragging nor complaining. We don’t talk about the accident, when Mom fell and broke both her wrists some years ago, working in her yard back home on the farm, pulling out tree roots and falling backwards on her wrists, spontaneously trying to break the fall. I simply said, “You’ve always been a hard worker, Mom.” I featured my parents in the Gazette when they celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary in 1987 (“A Love Story”), their 50th wedding anniversary in 1997 (“Love on the Land”), and their 60th wedding anniversary in 2007 (“One Decade After the Other”). I also did a special page for them in my online album five years later, photographing the celebration of their 65th. You’d think it’d all be covered by now, but it seems there’s always more to hear in the long life of my parents. The stories don’t change, but there are always paragraphs I never heard before. This time Dad told us how our home place in southwestern Minnesota came to be. The farm has a big mailing address today that makes it sound metropolitan: 3118 - 170th Avenue. It’s located three miles west of Ghent, then one mile south. Mom and Dad have lived there since shortly after they were married on May 20th, 1947. Nobody would suspect a 170th Avenue in that neck of the woods but numbering in the whole grid has changed. Many things have remained the same, however. There's still a mailbox at the end of the gravel driveway. The house is still painted a shade of blue. There's always coffee and food on the table.
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The Victoria GAZETTE |
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May 2014 |
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My parents, Joe and Betty Claeys, on Wednesday, April 9th, 2014, by their house on the farm at Ghent, MN. Mom and Dad always walk out with us to say goodbye as we drive off the farm. We wave until we can’t see each other anymore. This time I ran back to take a picture. |