I want to be just like my mother-in-law when I grow up!

I want to be just like my mother-in-law when I grow up!

For the first twenty or so years of my married life, I had an amazing mother-in-law. She was a woman with a gift for living and a gift for being a wife, bookkeeper, mother, mother-in-law, grandmother and great grandmother. For the later years of my married life I was fortunate to also have this lovely woman as a friend. This wonderful, supportive friend that I taught to quilt when she was eighty, always understood the priorities of life. She embraced the importance of having popcorn for dinner, so you can go out for chocolate cheesecake for dessert, and was a  friend whose zest for life always gave me a lift. We shared countless cups of tea and glasses of wine while we contemplated the problems of the world, talked about the books we had read and shared our struggles with spouses' illnesses, and the indignities of growing older.  She died last week, at age 97, just as she would have liked, after a brief illness and full life,  and with several of her children holding her hands, but selfishly, I will miss her.

Maxine Cornell, 1912-2010, a woman who lived both the width and length of life!