Mom, if there is a way you can know what I’m doing today, I want to say thank you for all the valentine boxes you helped me make (you made) for school, and I want to say “You are my Valentine.”

Amy Rodgers Venter was into scrapbooking. Not the kind with all the fancy edgings and doodads added but those made up from newspaper and magazine clippings. This is one of the scrapbooks passed on to me. She loved to make this kind – babies, kiddies, and animals, the kind she always thought those old folks at the nursing home would like.

My mother was smart; I think she could have aced most subjects as far as intellect was concerned. But she so loved the simple things. Her writings were basically narratives of facts. She wrote of puppies and rabbits, and sometimes took a bit of creative liberty with what they might do or say.

We sometimes laughed at how aghast she would be at the cleavage of the HeeHaw girls.

Loyal Democrat to the core, she never believed it could be true that they would do anything wrong, particularly abortion, declaring, “I know my daddy would not have believed that.” Near the end she did say, “Well, if what they say about Bill Clinton is true…” Kind of sad to see her humbled by such grossness in her heroes.

She was what the Bible speaks of when it says: “Whatsoever things are pure…(Phil. 4:8)

Mom’s sanctified version of YouTube: