My Mother and I

MP3 Audio CD. My Mother and I

I

THE mere writing of this account is a chain, slight but never Co be broken; one that will always bind me to that from which I had thought myself forever cut off. .For I am writing not only of myself. In myself I see one hundred thousand young men and women with dark eyes aflame with enthusiasm, or blue eyes alight with hope. In myself, as I write this record, I see the young girl whose father plucked golden heavy oranges in Italian gardens, the maiden whose mother worked on still mornings in the wide fields of Poland, the young man whose grandmother toiled in the peat-bogs of Ireland. I am writing this for myself and for those who, like me, are America's foster-children, to remind us of them, through those pioneer courage the bright gates of this beautiful land of freedom were opened to us, and upon whose tumuU of grey and weary years of struggle we, their children, rose to our opportunities, I am writing to those sons and daughters of immigrant fathers and mothers who are now in America, to those who will come after this devastating war to America, and to those who will receive them. I am a college woman. My husband is privileged in an honourable profession. Our home is unpretentious but pretty, and is situated in a charming old suburb of an American city where attractive modern residences stand by the side of stately old Colonial houses, as if typifying young America in the shadow of old America. Our work has been shifting us over the country's face; we have been in the Gulf States, in the Middle West, in New York. Until now we have never lived near my former home where my father and mother still are. Perhaps I should never have seen into mother's heart, into her life as related to my own, if she had not come last winter to visit us. That brief visit of mother's brought back old pictures. . . .