This post is a memorial to my mom, Shirley Prager, who went
home to be with the Lord on
December
30, 2014 due to complications arising from COPD.
She grew up at the end of a 5-mile dirt road in the
foothills of eastern Tennessee . As a young girl living on a subsistence farm,
hiking was a way of life for her. She
would hike to go to school, hike to go to church, hike to go to the store, hike
to visit her relatives over the mountain.
As a young woman, she moved to the City of Cincinnati ,
but the big city never took the country out of her. She insisted on washing most of our clothes
by hand even though we had an automatic washer/dryer. She built a desk from scratch using nails and
wood so that I could do my grade school homework. She saved pieces of old fabric to sew
together to make quilts.
When I was a young boy, she took me for hikes in the woods
behind our house. We did many of the
early hikes in this blog together. She
taught me to value God’s creation in its natural state, to treat animals kindly
and respectfully, to never throw away something you can use again, to earn
every dollar you spend, and to never spend more than you earn.
As time did to her body what it does to all of us, her
ability to hike diminished. We took our
last hike together at Totem Bight State Park in July 2011 on our Alaska
cruise, a gift I gave her for her 75th birthday. Although she could no longer hike, she would
ride with me to the trailhead and wait around the trailhead while I hiked. She preferred a day at a woodland trailhead
over a day in our city home.
She won’t be waiting at the trailhead any more. A true backwoods angel in the flesh during her
life, henceforth she will come with me on every trail. Shirley Ruth Prager, 1936-2014.
So sorry for your loss. My mother is only 61 and can barely hike anymore. I shudder to imagine how she will be at 75. But as you said in a previous comment on another blog post, we should enjoy and appreciate every moment with our loved ones and never, ever take them for granted.
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