Tex

My mom is the oldest of four children born to my Mormon grandparents. Grandpa graduated from BYU, never drank coffee or alcohol, didn't believe we evolved from apes, and had beliefs that my brother and I found odd and challenged when we got old enough to think for ourselves. I never really figured out whether my grandmother was a true Mormon or just went along with it all those years. She drank coffee and alcohol, smoked, and never gave her views on evolution. My aunt once told me that she caught my grandfather kissing another woman in the coat closet during one of their dinner parties.

My mother was impossibly tall and willowy. She was damn near as tall as my grandfather at 6 feet. She had dark hair, wide-set hazel eyes, high cheekbones and a square jaw. She was once approached by a New York modeling scout. My grandmother packed her up and took her in to see the agent, but she was rejected because she couldn't hold a quarter between her legs.

She grew up in Boulder and they moved to Ithaca when she was in high school. The other kids thought she spoke with a twang, so they called her Tex. That name didn't stick after high school.

She was an avid reader and artist. She had a penchant for fashion and I still have a stack of designs she drew while in high school. Her brother was seven years younger than she and the Twins eleven years younger, so my grandmother's monomaniacal matriarchal focus shifted from her eventually. Even though she lived at home while attending Cornell, she was more free to socialize and I suspect began to take full advantage. She dated many handsome bachelors and somehow ended up with the tall rower from Cornwall-on-Hudson.

She once confided to me that her year of graduate school at Syracuse was wonderful. She savored the freedom to study and be free again. It was the 1960s and she embraced the burgeoning women's liberation movement.

My grandparents offered to buy us a house in Ithaca -- but only Ithaca. My mother valued her independence and decided that we would break away and go it on our own.

We moved to a tiny town in upstate New York called Barneveld. We rented a cute little house in the country and she commuted into the Monson Williams Proctor Institute in Utica, where she was the librarian. She once told me she often pulled the little Saab over to the side of the road and cried on the way to work.