My mother was a "hands-on" person; a lot of people in her family were like that. In one form or another they like to get hold of a raw material and make something else out of it.

My young parents lived on the upper floor of a duplex on Alderson Street, then bought their first house on Shady Ave. Ext.; this was in the mid-1950s. It was and still is a small brick house that sits on the crest of the hill that plunges down into Beechwood Blvd. There was a lot of space around this house, making a crowded, overgrown garden; thick green vines covered the house.

One of my earliest memories of that house is watching my mother yanking these vines from it, then creating a beautiful rock garden in front. There was another garden in the back where flowers bloomed all through the spring and summer; my mother planned it so that something would be in bloom through the whole growing season.

But gardening was only a part of what my mother could do. She was a competent seamstress, making some of our clothes, and clothes for my dolls as well. She made our Halloween costumes and our Purim costumes too. (Purim is a minor Jewish holiday that comes in the early spring.) She also liked to sculpt; she made, out of clay, the image of a woman's head thrown back, her hair flying out at all angles, facing into a wind. It was a little eerie, this woman's head, but I felt the deepest respect for my mother for creating it. I think, through the years, that my mother and her sisters all attended art classes at Carnegie-Mellon University when it was called Carnegie-Tech.

What does this list of my mother's accomplishments add up to? She took what was in front of her and made it into a home.