Happy Birthday Mom! Part 2

For her birthday I wanted to share a memory that I have of my mom, which also loosely inspired the painting that I posted earlier. There's no doubt I could share over a thousand things that I have done with my mom, or that she has done for me, and I don't think that I could list any of them by importance. Every memory I have is special, and this one is no different.

It's September 30th, so it's fall and the leaves are changing. One thing I really enjoyed doing as a child was looking for and collecting brightly colored leaves that had fallen off the trees in my back yard. I would bring these damp, sometimes crumbly, leaves into the house and from there Mom would press them for me between two pieces of wax paper. It seemed like a magical process and even as an adult I'm not sure if I could do it without making a mess of my iron, I know I would get something wrong.

She usually did this for me as part of a leave identification project for school, but I know that it was also sometimes just for fun. I could probably have had hundreds of leaves a year if I wanted. I'm not sure what happened to my leaves after I got tired of looking at them, because the next year we would do it all over again.