Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Dear Mom,

Happy Mother’s Day! We’re all together on Mother’s Day again. Last year it was Tim’s wedding and we all gathered at Tracey and Steve’s home in South Carolina to celebrate. It was sure weird though, that first Mother’s Day without you. This year we are all at Randy and Joanne’s new place in Montana. We were up late last night, sitting around a fire, drinking wine and telling stories. It was really nice, being together all four of us and our husbands and wives. It had a very Cape Cod vibe. We’re all a little foggy this morning.

Not gonna lie…it’s still pretty weird waking up on Mother’s Day and not being able to call you. That was always the center of the day, calling you. Even though we talked most days of the week, especially after cell phones became a thing, there was always something just a bit more special about the Mother’s Day call. Remember when all we had was landlines, phones attached to a wall or cordless phones that were still tethered to a box wired to the wall? You and Dad let us call collect or reverse the charges when we were all too broke to be able to afford long-distance calls. We sure were a “talk on the phone” family.

I guess this letter will have to do now.

How’s Dad? What part of life, what stage have you two settled on in Heaven? Did Dad pick up donuts and pastries before he headed out to play golf? No matter how old I am when I think about Mother’s Day when we all still lived together it always started with donuts! Even in Southbridge, those chocolate-covered glazed donuts in a box sitting at your seat at the kitchen table. We probably won’t eat donuts today but we all have a vision of you treating yourself to an extra donut on Mother’s Day.

We’re all headed to brunch in a bit. More like Mother’s Day after we all grew up and had jobs and families and maybe all gathered at the Club for brunch in front of the big fireplace in the clubhouse. You’d be happy about how often we get to see each other. Darric and Nick are getting married so we have two big events on the calendar coming up. But we seem to be pretty good at finding ways to be together without an event, too, like this weekend in Montana.

Everybody’s good Mom. Everybody’s happy. For sure each one of us has stuff going on we wish we didn’t have. Who doesn’t, right? That parts a little bit harder now that we can’t just pick up a phone and chat with you and Dad about whatever that happens to be. You can be sure that we all remember a call or two when we could let you do a little later in life parenting. But really, we’re all pretty OK. You’d be proud of the people we’ve become.

It’ll be weird again not hearing your voice today. Probably always will I guess. We’re all thinking of you and of all the Mother’s Days we had together. Joanne and Randy are hosting brunch at the clubhouse. If we’re very lucky, maybe they’ll have chocolate covered donuts, just like we used to have. I’d sure like to hear your voice though.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. Tell Dad we all said hi.

Love,

Darrell, Randall, Tracey, and Kerstin

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 10th, 2026 at 11:31 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.