Norma’s Poetry & Short Stories

This website is my tribute to Norma (“Mom” as we all knew her.)

Norma loved her family, her cats, clocks, music and writing. She wrote about whatever was going on in her life at the time. She wrote about love when she was happy and lost love when she was sad or lonely. She wrote about losing the love of her life and about the children they shared. Each life event brought a poem from “Mom” with a special message for the recipient.

She dreamed of publishing her work and a few pieces were. In the days before she died she spoke again of this dream. I promised to put up a website and get everything on the computer, ready to publish. Kelly read the poetry aloud to her in those last days and also promised to help “get it all together” and this is the beginning. There are a lot of pages to go through because she has writings from her childhood. She was 84.

She wanted her cat poems and stories to be published together and they are first on the list.

There were words she never wrote because they caused her too much pain. Pain that she carried with her every day of her life from 1973 – 2006. Pain she felt others didn’t understand, couldn’t understand because they hadn’t lost what she had. A husband and a son to cancer, each in their early 50’s and a second husband Frank to a form of blood cancer in the 1990’s. She loved spending time with her sister Doris at South Padre but couldn’t bear to go there after Doris died a few years ago.

I assured her that where she is going, she’ll understand the hows and whys of everything. Everything will make sense to her and she’ll be there watching us trying to get it right! Vicki and Larry are both there with her now and I’m sure it was a great reunion!

Visiting her home was like walking into a well decorated museum of clocks and collectibles. Sleeping there was a challenge to those who were not accustomed to clocks chiming at odd times throughout the night. At one time she had collected over 90 clocks from all over the world.

Norma and I had lots of late night talks, often into the wee hours of the morning. I missed out on a lot because I didn’t come into the family until 1984. She told me tales of everyone in the family so beware, I may know something about you that you don’t know I know. 🙂 Did you have to read that twice?

As it was with lots of older writings before computers, she used a lot of pencil. This has caused much of the material to be unreadable after all of these years so I am not sure how much more I can recover.

Thanks Mom, for welcoming me into the family and treating me like a daughter even though I was just tagging along with “Joe.”

And to all of you who thought this would never happen, gotcha! This is 3/11/2007 the day before Norma’s birthday. Okay, so it took me 6 months!

Check back soon for more & enjoy reading!

PS I found another box, just have to get through them.