Celebrating Margaret Elizabeth Gaston (1915-1990)
Today I salute my mother, a blend of grit and grace, both magical and practical. She never lived in a house her family owned. Her father, a minister, was provided a parsonage when she growing up and her husband, my father, also a minister, was provided a house in her adult years. Yet every house she lived in was her own, full of extensions of her broad ranging curiosity. She had a collection of over one hundred bells from all over the world which were cataloged and displayed throughout our house. She had eight or ten paired international dolls dressed in native attire which helped remember she was a member of a global family. She listened to LP records of Broadway musicals, operas, and classical symphonies and music filled the rooms through hot air heating ducts. Each house she cast as a life-laboratory which made my growing up years exploratory and stimulating.
In 1951 when she was 36 we moved from Cincinnati, Ohio to Denton, Montana on the prairie. She was accustomed to moving. We had already lived in Michigan, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania by 1950. She did not want to leave the East for the unknown West and she was excited to discover life in the unknown West. With enthusiasm she entered the ranch life that surrounded our little town, hiking and camping in the Judith Mountains and the Missouri River Breaks, attending cattle branding events in the spring and harvest festivals in the fall. She loved my father and his work and found everyone in her new life interesting.
As a Cincinnati city girl and young woman she became a supportive wild west mother, allowing me to range far and wide, going places she preferred I didn’t go and doing things she preferred I didn’t do. Her motto was safety, but not first. Being full thrust forward into the thick of life was first. My boyhood wasn’t about her. It was about me. And so she made allowances and managed her fear for my safety. I always came home safely with her waiting to hear of my latest adventure.
In 1970 I went with her to one of her childhood homes in Riverside, a suburb of Cincinnati along the Ohio River. She pointed out a chin-up bar in the yard and told me that in her early childhood she was in poor health. A doctor told her parents she would not live much past ten. To build up her strength her father erected that chin-up bar which was still there fifty four years later. She put effort into gaining strength as a child and seventy fully engaged and fulfilling years later she died in my father’s arms.
From her I received love in the form of encouragement to be more than one aspect of me.
She died on Mother’s Day, May 13, 1990.