Our Excellent Parents

I find myself bragging about my parents once in awhile. I had a conversation with someone at work about food, which somehow led into my mom's habit of baking 12 loaves of bread at a time in the oven, by using 48 oz juice cans as loaf pans and placing the loaves into the oven vertically. My fifth grade teacher challenged mom to make triangular bread, which she did, by flattening the sides of the juice can to make a triangular profile.

We used to harvest terra cotta-like clay from roadside cuts and learned to work up clay and work with it. She taught us to make candles, and occasionally we had a taffy pull. We also used to camp and go backpacking in the Blue Mountains/Eagle Cap Wilderness area. We identified, picked and dried wildflowers, and so much more. Living with my parents was like having home schooling, over and above regular school.

My parents worked hard, and taught us to work, also. We grew accustomed to hardship in many ways: by helping work in their extensive vegetable garden, by carrying our own backpacks on trips [which were primitive by modern standards, and most notably had shoulder straps without padding, which felt as if they would wear a groove into our shoulders]; sleeping outdoors with just a tarp fastened over us to [mostly] keep out the rain, and so forth. Our parents were children of the Depression, and we learned to conserve and use resources wisely.

While the children are yet in their infancy feed them from the breast of heavenly grace, foster them in the cradle of all excellence, rear them in the embrace of beauty. Give them the advantage of every useful kind of knowledge. Let them share in every new and rare and wondrous craft and art. Bring them up to work and strive, and accustom them to hardship. Teach them to dedicate their lives to matters of great import . . .

~Selections From the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Baha