ARedRoseforMama

A Red Rose for Mama
Robert H. Gilbert, Jr.
March 23, 1994

                     Happy Mother’s Day to you, dear Mama,
              Even though it’s twenty years since you’ve been gone.
                    Happy Mother’s Day to you, dear Mama,
                I’ll bring a red rose to you myself someday.

I remember as a little boy growing up in the mountains of Kentucky with Ma and Pa, Billy Ray, and Mary
Sue.
Billy Ray was twelve, Mary sue was ten, and I was eight. (I was afraid to ask Ma and Pa how old they were!)
We were a poor hillbilly family.
Pa did not make much money doing odd jobs, so he couldn’t afford to buy a car.
He barely made enough to put food on the table and buy clothes and shoes for us kids to wear to school.
We wanted a house like all the other folks down in the valley, but we knew that Pa and Ma could not afford a nice house.
Ma was a seamstress who did some sewing for the ladies in town just to get a little extra money to help Pa. She would go to houses to do housework.
Sometimes it would be raining or snowing, and the wind was bitterly cold here in the mountains.
But Ma would still go and do the things that she could to help Pa.

Ma and Pa had a bedroom, and sister had a bedroom, but Billy and I slept on the dirt floor in two big
sleeping bags zipped together.
During the winter, Pa would put fire logs on the floor with a sheet of plywood on top, then we put our
sleeping bags on top of the plywood.
We might have been poor folks to other people, but we were a happy family.
We had to walk to school five miles every day, no matter what the weather might be.
Each day on the way home, I would stop at a place where there were many wildflowers growing, and
I would pick two handfuls of flowers to take to Mama.
I would run into the house with a grin on my face and say, “Mama, these flowers are for you!”
She would lean down and take them from my hands. “Why, they are very beautiful, Johnny! Thank you.” She would place them in a jar and place the jar in the window beside the others that were full of flowers.

One day when I got home with the flowers, I asked her what was her favorite flower of all the flowers in the world.
Being a little boy of eight, I didn’t know how many kinds of flowers there were.
Surely, I thought, there must be three or four different kinds of flowers growing somewhere other than these wildflowers.
Mama sat down at the table, placed me on her lap, and said, “Johnny, I guess the most beautiful flower that I like is the red rose.”
“I ain’t seen no red rose around here, Mama.”
She just smiled and said, “No, child, I haven’t seen any either.”
“Why a red rose, Mama?”