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There’s a saying among quilters that “whoever dies with the most fabric, wins.” My mother will always hold the first-place prize! After she had passed away, I took on the monumental task of sorting out her fabric room. And it seriously was a whole room dedicated to fabric, stacks of it, from floor to ceiling.

My daughters helped me, and since they love to sew, they wanted to keep some of the fabrics that they thought were “so
sick” and “retro-cool.” What made me laugh is that my sweet mother had purchased them in the 1970s, probably on sale, when they actually were cool the first time around. To this day, whenever I design a new doll, quilt, jewelry, or fabric, I always ask myself, “Would my mother like it?”

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My father cherished the idea of having almost everything we consumed be homegrown and fresh. He spent most of his life trying to be “green.” If he could walk to where he was going instead of using gas, he would do that. He bought a cow to provide milk for the family, and one of my two oldest brothers had the daily chore of milking the cow. My mother pasteurized the milk in a small metal tub, pouring off the cream into mason jars. My dad planted fruit bushes, raspberries and boysenberries, apricot trees, and rows of vegetables. Nothing went to waste, including everything made for every meal, which is how it was growing up with eight brothers. I never even understood the
concept
of leftovers until I was probably ten years old. My mother made her own sun-dried fruits on a screened box my father built. That was our candy. We called them “candy-cots.”

Every year for Christmas, each of us would get an orange and a handful of walnuts still in the shell in the bottom of our Christmas stockings, underneath our other small toys and treats. When my parents were children, a simple orange was a delicacy that some people could afford only once a year, especially a widowed mother like Grandma Osmond or two poor
schoolteachers like my mother’s parents. “Santa” would put them in our stockings to remind us that we were blessed with everything we had.

When “Santa” ate her own orange, she was teaching a lesson in appreciating simple pleasures. She would often comment, “Aren’t these oranges delicious? Can you believe we have such good things to eat?” She was always amazed by the bounty of the earth. She would put a raspberry from our backyard into her mouth and say, “Nothing tastes better than homegrown. Isn’t it the most joyous creation? What flavor! You can’t get that at a grocery store.”

Some of the food grown in our garden was shared with neighbors and family, but my mother canned most of it for the winter months. Canning was also a family project. Everyone helped to wash and prepare the fruit, slicing and depitting the peaches and apricots, washing the green beans, boiling and peeling the fresh tomatoes, destemming cherries, and lining up the mason jars and lids. When my mother would open one of her mason jars of canned peaches on a snowy day, you would think she was unwrapping the crown jewels. She’d instruct each of us, “Now don’t eat fast. Enjoy them.” She and my father would sit at the dinner table, savoring every bite as if they would never taste it again. My brothers and I would grin behind their backs, but the message was clear. We were not to take for granted the bounty of the earth, which was a blessing. My mother even made and bottled her own root beer. It was the best, unless she accidentally put too much yeast in it. Then, sometimes late at night, we would hear the sound of a “pop,”
like a firework being shot off in the distance. It was one more bottle of root beer exploding in the root cellar.

On Sunday nights, we would watch
The Wonderful World of Disney
and have root beer floats with homemade vanilla ice cream. It’s a tradition I’ve carried forward with my own kids every Sunday: root beer floats and popcorn. Sadly, only the popcorn is homemade in my home and sometimes the ice cream.

Each everyday task, while I was a little girl, was a family affair. Doing the dishes after dinner was a production line with my mother at the sink and each child having a dish towel to dry and put away what they had been handed.

Even when we had all grown up and my parents, in their seventies, moved to a smaller home in Manti, Utah, they still plowed and planted a one-acre garden.

My brother Tom and his family lived next door to them and sometimes I would have to call their house to find out what was going on with my parents, they were so active and busy. I often worried that they were overdoing it. One afternoon, Tom’s wife, Carolyn, called me. “You will not believe what your parents are up to now!” she said.

For a minute I was alarmed, until I realized she was laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe. “Your father told your mother that he was tired of caring for the oversize garden she had planted and that since there were no kids living at home, they didn’t need all the food they were growing. He said he was going to dig it under before the fresh sprouts produced way too much food to handle. She came back with ‘Oh, good laws,
George, you just want to go outside and play with your new tractor. Leave it alone.’ But your father didn’t listen.”

It seems my father said, “Say good-bye to the garden, dear. My John Deere and I have work to do.” He went outside, hopped on his new tractor, and began digging under the garden at the outer perimeters, making large circles toward the center. Mother ran outside, stood in the center of the garden, and yelled, “You stop it, George!” But he just chuckled and circled closer and closer in. Finally, my mother lay down on the ground, spread-eagle, in front of her rows of peas. As the tractor came near, she screamed and laughed, “Don’t you dare take out my last row of peas!!”

My mother won. That fall there was a freezer full of garden peas.

Later in her life, my mother gave me a lot of her canning supplies. Just as my mother taught me, I taught my children to can fruit and bake bread whenever it was possible. I was usually able to get to bottling fruit only once a year, because it was hard to set aside the time.

When she had been sent home from the hospital to live out her life, and about ten months before she died, my mom wrote me a note as I sat next to her bed. It said, “We need to bottle some cherries together soon.” I tried to hide my tears that day because I knew that it would probably never happen again, because her physical health was diminishing with every passing week.

Once the Utah Valley cherries were harvested, I decided to make sure her wish came true. With my young daughters, I
went to buy several quarts of fresh cherries and took them to Grandma’s house, along with all of the canning supplies I had inherited.

The nurse had managed to prop my mother up in a wheelchair so that she could be pushed up to the kitchen table. My girls and I washed and plucked the stems from the cherries and then delivered them to the table, where my mother painstakingly, but with a broad grin on her face, dropped them into the jars, one by one.

The next year, as I was leaving town to go to Philadelphia to do four shows on QVC, my neighbor came over with about ten quarts of fresh-picked cherries from his orchard. My kids love fresh cherries, but I knew that most would probably get soft and be wasted before we could get to them. My mother had passed away months before, and looking at the overflowing box of fruit made my heart ache. I knew that the first thing my mother would have done was get out the canning jars and supplies. I began to cry as I put the cherries on the kitchen counter and left for the airport.

When I got back home three days later, the box of fresh cherries had been replaced by eight jars of cherries. Rachael, though barely a teenager, had remembered the steps her grandmother and I had shown her the previous year and had taken it upon herself to wash and bottle all the cherries. When I complimented her on her self-motivation, she said, “You know, Grandma would have been really unhappy if we had wasted them.”

It reminded me that even though children may not appreciate
learning something that feels like a chore at the time, they are often glad to have that skill later in life.

A friend of mine who returned to college to study child psychology passed some interesting information on to me a while back. I keep a file of articles and stories that feel life-changing, especially when it comes to parenting. In the journal
Psychology & Marketing
(March 2010), there was a published study showing that most kids—even preschoolers—recognize dozens of corporate logos such as McDonald’s, Disney, and sugary breakfast cereals with toys inside. Sadly, there is a growing number of children who have no concept of where food comes from and can’t identify certain whole fruits and vegetables. Many children grow up in urban areas where fresh fruits and vegetables are scarce or are weeks old from being trucked across the country. More and more kids never have the experience of growing even simple herbs or seeing an orchard, unlike when we were kids and picking apricots from the trees was an all-day chore. How can children grow to appreciate the blessings of the earth if they have no concept of what the earth produces?

With my parents at the helm, every chore was used as a value lesson about accountability. We were taught to take care of the gifts we had been given: family, talents, health, food, opportunities, our home, and our possessions. We were never allowed to waste anything, unless it was absolutely unavoidable. Most of all, we were held accountable to one another. People always came before possessions.

My father taught me this lesson early in my life. When I was about five, my
father came home one evening with little netted bags of foil-covered chocolate coins for each of us. We rarely had “store-bought” candy, and it was considered a big treat if we did. I carried mine around the house, protecting my loot as if it were actual gold coins. Well, it was chocolate, after all. The next day my father asked, “Can I have one of your chocolate coins?”

I couldn’t believe he wanted one of mine! He hadn’t asked any of my brothers for one of theirs. Why did I have to sacrifice?

Then, in my five-year-old head, I schemed a quick way to keep them all. I told him, “I’m sorry. I would give you one, but I’m saving them all for later.” I thought my father would think that I was being wise and frugal and be proud of me, but his face was very disappointed. About twenty minutes later, when I was feeling extremely guilty for my selfishness, I took the chocolate coins to him and said, “Daddy, you can have one.” I thought this was the perfect solution. He could have just one, I wouldn’t feel guilty anymore, and I could keep the other ten or twelve to myself. I never expected his response in a million years.

“Oh, I don’t want one anymore. Since I gave you the whole bag in the first place, I think I’ll take the whole bag back.” Then he stood up, lifted the bag of candy from my hands, and walked out of the room.

I was devastated, but I knew I couldn’t cry over a situation I had created for myself. A bit later, he used the incident as a teaching moment, explaining how God had given us gifts to
share, not to hoard and keep to ourselves. He said our blessings were like a pizza that was cut into ten slices. Would you even miss it if you gave one slice to someone else? He likened that to the tithing he paid to the Lord.

About a year later, I used a very liberal interpretation of my father’s lesson to justify a moment of kleptomania! This was when my brothers were regulars on the
Andy Williams Show
, and one night we were invited to dinner at the home of a man who did many of the character voices for the Disney cartoons. He and his wife had a daughter who was a few years older than me. We went to play in her room, which was extremely elegant compared to mine at home. She had a gorgeous dresser with a mirror over it and a shelf filled with hundreds of tiny glass animals that captivated my attention. I’ve always loved the way elephants looked, so I was mesmerized by the little blue glass elephant with his trunk curled up in the air. After a while, the girl went to ask her parents something, and she left me alone in her room. Minutes later, I heard my mother call out that it was time to go home. I thought to myself, “She has a whole shelf full of glass animals. She can share this one with me. She won’t even miss it.” I cupped the tiny glass elephant in my hand so no one could see it and went out to say my good-byes. I made it all the way to the car, my heart pounding in my chest at the thought of being caught. My teeth were chattering in fear that my parents or hers would figure out that I was a thief. I could see the police car lights and hear the sirens in my imagination.

I took my place in the car, between my parents in the front
seat. It seemed like I had made it! I was going to get away with stealing!

Once the car started up, I knew it was too late to make any other choice, so I kept my hand closed over the little glass animal even tighter. Call it mother’s intuition, or maybe I wasn’t doing quite the Oscar-winning acting job that I thought I was, but my mother quickly picked up on the fact that I had something to hide. As we drove along, she said, “You’re awfully quiet. Is anything wrong?”

“No. Nothing’s wrong.” I almost choked on my own lie and I could barely swallow.

Once we got home, I was hoping to get the elephant inside and hide it in my room somewhere before anyone knew. My mother got out of the car before me. As I moved to get out of the car from her passenger door, the tiny glass elephant slid out of my hand and shattered on the asphalt. My mother turned at the sound of the shattered glass, which I can’t believe she even heard.

“What was that?” she asked.

Since it was dark out, I thought I could still cover my misdeed.

“I don’t know,” I said, dashing for the front door and leaving the elephant on the driveway.

I can’t remember how I was finally pressed to confess, but I vividly recall the shame I felt not only for stealing, but for outright lying to my mother. That shame was worse than any punishment I was given.

The next morning, I went out to pick up the elephant from the driveway, but it was already gone.

Two days later, when the girl’s father came to the house to drop something off for my brothers, my mother called me to the front door to tell our good family friend what I had done. I was so embarrassed to confess that I had stolen from his home. I can’t even remember his reaction or how it was that I made it up to his daughter. I was overwhelmed by my own humiliation.