MamaTo The Rescue

Mama To The Rescue

I’ve written about my grandfather, Archibald A. Warden, who was a medal Olympian, and how he had wanted Mama to also strive to be an accomplished athlete. Mama was, indeed, a gifted woman athletically. Of course we, (my siblings and I)never realized just how talented she was. Even in her later years as a senior adult, she was able to shame us kids when we tried to compete with her. Sure, we were perhaps quicker and had more endurance, but you could just watch her swing a tennis racket with smooth strokes that belied her age, and know that she would almost certainly beat any of us in a match. All of that was done while wearing the community clothes, ankle length dresses of days long past. But tennis was not her only forte. It was in her seventies when I watched her swimming in Cameo Lake in New York. With powerful smooth strokes she cut through the waters with hardly a ripple. Indeed, she was truly blessed with athletic prowess and grace.

I remember a couple of incidences that occurred while we were living in Paraguay. Her athleticism came in handy when she rescued my younger sister from a fire. Selma, my sister, had insisted on having a lighted candle in the window that was located by her bed. She had wanted to fall asleep to candle-light. However, the candle caught a curtain on fire. Seeing the fire, Mama jumped through the dining room window into Selma’s bedroom and ripped the curtains from the window, then, while the material burned she jumped back, threw the burning material out the window, jumped back through the window, and extinguished the flames.

Then there was another time that Mama jumped through a window. On that occasion, though, Mama was not intent on saving one of her children, but was concerned about a rabbit that wandered too close to a dog. Seeing the danger that the rabbit had put itself into, Mama once again hurled herself through the window and rescued the hapless rabbit from the jaws of said dog. “Ole!!”