Love can soften a hard life

My sister, Kathy, who is an artist, was going to throw out a large

watercolor she had done of my maternal grandmother, Mary Ann Green

Adams, standing in front of her beloved flower garden, the hollyhocks

and roses towering above her.

Kathy was discarding the painting because she

hadn't quite captured the peacefulness and love that emanated from my

grandmother's eyes and the gentleness in her face.

I took it anyway.

For a long time the rescued painting hung in

the front hall of my home in Connecticut.

I would often call attention to the picture

and make sure to show it to my friends. My grandmother never traveled

more than 100 miles from her home in Layton, so it was fitting that she

took center stage so far from home.

She was the mother of 13 children and the

wife of a farmer who struggled to make a living during the Depression.

If you were to hear her story, you would think her life difficult and

harsh, but it wasn't, because she didn't perceive it that way.

I think my grandmother would have said to me,

\"So you have a college education, a nice house, have traveled far —

does that make your life any more meaningful or wonderful than mine?\"Everyone knows there are good mothers and bad mothers, working

mothers and stay at home mothers — mothers who have a real knack for

babies, others for teenagers. Some have little money to exist on, like

my grandmother, and others have mansions and servants.

The one thing they have

in common is very little previous training. \"The moment a child is

born,\" said the Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, \"the mother is