On January 19, 2012, my mom, Annie Louise Urvan passed away. Plagued by memory and physical problems for her last few years, she nevertheless leaves behind a legacy of love, generosity, beauty and an amazing sense of style.
The memories I have for her will always include the color pink. She didn't just have pink dresses, and sweaters and lipstick, she loved everything pink. I believe if she could have painted the world pink she would have. She decorated our house in pink and purple, even her sofa was a muted shade of pink. At one point in my childhood, she not only painted the kitchen pink but she also spray painted the refrigerator pink. It was definitely cause for wonder and amazement whenever my friends came over.
Throughout her life, my mom had an amazing sense of style and beauty. She loved clothes, fashion, make-up and jewelry. In her younger years, she was always dressed in the current fashion. I remember in my teenage hippie days when all of us sported white go go boots, my mom bought herself some as well. Her closets were jam-packed with clothes. Of course many of them were pink...
We moved to Florida when I was around eight years old and my mom absolutely loved the beach. She baked in the sun for hours, nurturing her tan. This of course was before the days of sunscreen and worry over skin cancer and she paid for it in later life. She loved to walk on the beach and at one time or another collected everything associated with the beach. She collected seashells, filling jars and baskets full of them. She collected drift wood and displayed it on the wall. At one point, she dug up and collected sand dollars which dried in rows on our back patio, bleaching them in the hot Florida sun. Later, she discovered a beach where she could collect sharks teeth. My step-father crafted a sifter for separating the sand out from the blackened teeth. When I began sorting through her house in the mountains of Georgia, I found jars of the sharks teeth, boxes and boxes of sea shells and sand dollars wrapped in tissue paper, all momentoes of her beach days carefully preserved in her home miles away from the ocean.
At some point, after I left home for college and career, my mom developed a love of gardening. I don't really remember her doing much of this when I was a youngster. In fact, yard work was a huge family chore with her mowing the grass and trimming bushes while my sister and I picked up the trimmings. We ALL hated the hot sweaty work of that. But my mom developed quite a backyard garden. She had fruit producing trees, orange, grapefruit and papaya. She would always bring bags of home-grown produce to Georgia when she would visit. Then there were the flower beds. Every spare inch was covered in a wild assortment of flowers blooming and vines trailing over fences. When she moved to the Georgia mountains, her first order of business was to start planting flowers and transforming the landscape. Now each season, I am surprised by the flowers that she planted that continue to bloom and grow. Right now in this warm Georgia winter, she has jonquils that are pushing up and threatening to bloom. She spent endless hours potting, replanting and nurturing her flower garden. It was truly a labor of love.
Just as she loved nurturing her flowers and creating a lovely environment around her, my mom loved nurturing her children. She was loving, encouraging and generous. She might disagree with your plans, she might give lots of unsolicited advice, but in the end she was always there to help. Once I had kids, she and my step-dad came for every Christmas and loved being part of the festivities. Mom would bring her huge containers of Chex Mix to share and whatever her current sweet obsession was. An extremely picky eater, she claimed almost everything hurt her stomach, but somehow anything sweet was tolerated. She loved cakes, cookies, ice cream and chocolate. Like a kid, her favorite part of any meal was dessert. She was never too busy to help. She baby-sat my daughters for endless hours when I returned to graduate school. She looked for things to do while visiting. Folding clothes, sweeping the porch... I could count on her to be busy working somewhere all the time. She was always eager to upgrade my lifestyle, buying me a new refrigerator, helping with the purchase of a van for easier transport of the kids. On a regular basis, she and my step-dad would arrive for weekend fixer-up projects. "Just make a list of what you want done," she would say. They'd show up and there would be a flurry of activity, hanging pictures, putting up shelves, John fixing everything and Mom supervising... and then just as quickly they'd be gone. Like the energizer bunny, she kept on giving and giving.
There are a lot of things that I will miss about my mom. But mostly I will always miss her love of beauty and sense of style, her smile, her encouragement, her generous loving spirit. Oh yes... and her love of the color pink.
