It is Thursday morning. There is a foot of snow on the ground in Woodbridge, and it is still coming down. School has been canceled and it looks like I will not be able to make it to the memorial service for my mother up in Williamstown.

I was supposed to offer words of remembrance at the service. Since I doubt I'll make it, I'll share some of them here.

We all remember different people different ways, and our memories of Alice Hynes are no different. Depending on who we are, she was a wife, a mother, a sister, an aunt, a cousin, a neighbor, a coworker, a friend, or many other different things. When they talk about writing, they say write about what you know. So, I'll focus on Alice Hynes, as mother and as friend.

The earliest memory I have of my mother is from when I was very young. I'm not sure exactly how old I was. I was in a bouncy chair. One of those canvas chairs hung from a large spring that connect to the moulding above the door. It was in our house in Williamstown. I was bouncing up and down merrily in the chair, facing the dining room, with my back towards the living room. My mother was in the kitchen preparing some sort of food. I had to go to the bathroom and I called to her.

That's it. I assume she got me and I made it to the bathroom in time. I assume there wasn't anything else going on. It is all I can remember from that very early fragment. Yet it reflects a couple important themes.

First, my mother was always there to help. Not just in the daily aspects of living, but in the community as well. She baked communion bread for the church. She volunteered at the learning center at the elementary school. She helped as a docent at the Clark Art Museum.

I was a bit of a daredevil as a kid, perhaps even reckless. It seemed like I was always in one scrape or another, and my mother was often taking me to the doctor's office. It was an old joke in the family, she would say, "If you break a leg, don't come running to me." Yet, she was always there when I was hurt.

The second theme that comes up is baking. She was always baking something. Beside bread for communion, she baked all the bread for our family. She baked cakes, pies, cookies, and a long list of other delights. An important aspect of her social life was a sewing circle she participated in. For us children, it meant staying home, while she went out to see her friends. But it also meant, tea rings. She would bake a tea ring to bring to sewing circle. She would bake an extra one that would be left at home for us kids.

I've written before about how in many ways, we had a charmed, idyllic childhood, which is perhaps the best praise any child could give to their parents. As I write this, I look out the window at the piles of snow. As an adult, I think about what it means for work and travel, but as a kid, it meant one thing, adventure. We would rush outside with our sleds, zooming down trails in the woods. Sometimes, I would get injured and limp back home to get bandaged up. Other times, we would play until we were soaked and freezing. Back at home, my mother would help us change to warm dry cloth and would be making hot chocolate and perhaps be baking something.

She would always have a cup of tea, herself. Often, she would be so busy, so engrossed in what she was doing, that she would make herself a cup of tea, and leave it steeping on the bread table, only to be found, much later, when it was very dark, and had turned cold. We were a family of tea drinkers. Birthdays would bring the Hynes birthday cake, a yellow cake, made from scratch, with a boiled sugar, marshmallowy frosting.

From my parents, I learned the importance of making things myself. My mother was a den mother in cub scouts and we made many great projects. As a family, we would make lemon sherbet in the winter, using ice we gathered from rock outcroppings along the road to freeze the sherbet. We would use milk from the family goats and, if we were lucky, a lemon from one of the lemon trees that we grew in our house.

In the summer, we would make root beer. We'd fill a five gallon pot full of water, sugar and root beer extract. We'd mix it and then siphon the root beer into bottles where it would sit and become fizzy. We would bring coolers of home made root beer to family gatherings, like at Aunt Betty's, or gatherings of friend, like afternoons with the Lulls in the Hopper.

We had a large garden, and many of my childhood memories are of planting peas and beans with my mother, or of canning them afterwards. As the weather got warm, we would sit around the kitchen table, shelling peas, cutting up beans or husking corn. My mother would be busy canning or freezing the produce to get us through the coming winter. If we worked hard and were productive, we would get to go to Margaret Lindley Park to go swimming in the afternoon. If it was a special occasion on the weekend, we might go up to Harriman Reservoir. We would play in the water and my mother would get a rare chance to rest.

Often, there would be an afternoon storm that would roll in. We'd swim until there was thunder, and then get in the car and head home. I've always enjoyed watching the weather. As a child, we would have maps of the United States, which we'd draw the weather patterns for my parents to see when they couldn't watch the weather.

It seems ironic that my mother died in a weather related accident and it is the weather that is keeping me from attending her memorial.

Now, I'm older. I can look back and see some of the struggles we faced as a family. Perhaps it wasn't all as idyllic as it seemed then, or at least as I remember it now. Yet it is these memories that will sustain me and I hope similar shared memories will sustain all of us as we celebrate the life of Alice Hynes.