I am grateful that I spent last week in South Dakota with my mom. Her generation grew up in an America far different than what her grandchildren and great-grandchildren will experience. Her generation bridged the Industrial Revolution into the modern digital age, saw the movement from countries focused on national interests to globalist interventionalist governments, and a cultural revolution that in 1938 few could have conceived of.
She lived a life of sacrifice, work, graciousness, style, and enjoyment in the simple pleasures. She liked watching the Iowa Hawkeyes, playing pinochle with us late into the night while sipping on a drink, and seeing her grandchildren grow up and keep the faith.
Geraldine Evelyn Remmes was born in Yankton, South Dakota, on September 4, 1938, to Leonard & Mary (Wieseler) Heine, the first of 11 children. Her parents were dairy farmers and, like most farm families, grew crops for feed, kept hogs and chickens, and the occasional horse for fun. The family vegetable garden was a half-acre near the farmhouse next to an orchard of apples, pears, and cherries that provided a beautiful entrance to the farm and blocking to the gravel road, which remains gravel to this day.
Growing up she learned skills that are now seen as artisan. They canned everything they could, milked the cows by hand, butchered the chickens, made their clothes, washed clothes in a tub, wrung them out in a wringer, and hung them out to dry using the wind and sun to dry them naturally. As far as caring for the environment. Nothing was wasted. One example - after clothing couldn’t be mended anymore, it was cut into patches for a quilt. I still have a quilt my grandmother made from likely my mother and her siblings’ clothes.
My mom began studies in a one-room schoolhouse at St. Helena Catholic in St. Helena, Nebraska. She graduated from Mount Marty H. S. in 1956. In 1959 she graduated from Alverno College in Milwaukee with a degree in Home Economics. Her career began as a teacher in Charter Oak, Iowa where she met my father. They were married in 1961 and she got pregnant immediately. The school let her go, not allowing a pregnant woman to teach. In five and a half years, she had five children, so working outside of the home was out of the question anyway. My last brother came four years later.
Besides keeping busy with her children, her interests in stitching included Hardanger, knitting, sewing, and quilting. Her needlepoint and Hardanger work is so fine that most people think it is a painting. People around the United States, through word of mouth, asked her to make keepsake bears out of their loved one’s old fur coats, workshirts, and school uniforms. She made around 1800.
She enjoyed refinishing furniture. There was a time, in the early 1970s, when she had her sites set on an antique Hoosier cabinet. My father said he didn’t have the $40 dollars to buy it, so she got a small one-time job delivering phone books in her 1957 Chevy to buy it herself. She refinished it to near-perfect condition. I have it - and it’s priceless because it represents her work ethic.
Mom was an okay cook, but an incredible baker. The grandchildren will miss her cinnamon rolls. I won’t even attempt to make them as it was all in the technique of whipping up the dough and knowing just how much flour to put in. It was an art, not a formula.
Her gardening kept her children well-supplied with homemade applesauce, salsa, pasta sauce, tomato juice, pears, jelly, and much more. My mom has 20 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.
My mother never had a cell phone. But appreciated the technology. This week using WhatsApp video call, she was able to meet her newest great-grandchild and our new grandson, William, born on February 13th to my son Nick and daughter-in-law Brooke. What a blessing modern technology can be. She also got to congratulate my son Joe on getting into medical school as his call came in about his acceptance while I was with my mother. She was thrilled that he chose to go to an osteopathic school.
Politically, she was a stanch Independent. When Trump came down the escalator in 2015, she knew she was voting for him and predicted he would win. She had a skepticism of government and read alternative media way before the plethora of alternative media we have available today.
More than anything she was a Christian and a patriot. As a member of St. Agnes Catholic Church, she was on the new church planning committee, dealing with many details to bring it to completion. She was active in Catholic Daughters, the church finance committee, and the choir.
She owned some farm ground with her sisters that is on the Missouri River. When they decided to sell the ground, they kept the frontage and developed it into rural residential lots. Two access roads had to be put in and then named. She says my father selected the names of the roads, but I know she had a hand in that as well. Instead of forever embedding her family name on a street, they named the roads after enduring American values – Independence Avenue and Liberty Road.
Last year when her health was beginning to fail, I asked her where she would like to go that she hadn’t been yet. She said the Holy Land. I promised to take her once she was able. I believe she has made it there already.
