Rachel Foster Avery, corresponding secretary of the National Women's Suffrage Association and a founder with Susan B Anthony of the International Council of Women, was a strong-willed and domineering presence in the life of her daughter Rose, and when her only grand-daughter was born, she insisted that the baby be named Rachel after her.  No shrinking violet herself, Rose named the child Mary and gave her Rachel as a middle name.  Her grandmother always called Mary by no other name but Rachel, the folks around her growing up in the artists' colony of Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, knew her as Mary Rachel, to everyone else she was just Mary.  I called her Mom.

 Susan B Anthony (l), Rachel Foster Avery (r)

Her Pop, Will Walton, descended from a Quaker family well-established in eastern PA since before the Revolution, was an architect who'd designed some of the homes in Rose Valley, a potter and an amateur tenor who often sang lead roles in the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas staged by the Rose Valley Chorus.  Rose was an artist and designer, and she took Mary out of school after the 8th grade to teach her at home, not trusting the public education system to get the all the facts right or to properly nurture her daughter's abilities as an artist.  Mary had an older brother, John, and another brother Harold who died in infancy.

Mary was still in her teens when she left home for New York City, where she found her place in the community of artists and left activists.  She and her boyfriend Jerry were recruited by Diego Rivera to go to Mexico where they travelled from village to village painting murals to promote the revolutionary government's literacy program.  After returning to New York, she and Jerry joined up with a young folksinger named Pete Seeger to found the Vagabond Puppeteers, a performance group that travelled upstate New York putting on musical puppet shows in support of striking dairy farmers.

Back again in New York City, Mary met Mike Jimenez, an American veteran of the Spanish Civil War.  He was a radio technician who played the saxophone and rode a motorcycle, charming and romantic.  They were married and their first son, Mikey, was born just after Mike shipped out to North Africa with the 82nd Airborne.  While Mike fought the war in Europe, Mary worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a welder in the confined space between the double hulls of warships under construction.

I was the post-war baby, and over the next eight years, there was another son and three daughters.  Mike became a labor union organizer in the industrial mill towns of upstate New York, ran for Congress as a socialist, built a house with the help of his brothers and friends off an unpaved country road on a hillside above the Mohawk River valley north of Rome.  Mary kept two big vegetable gardens that she worked all summer, canning the homegrown beans and tomatos along with the peaches and pears that she bought by the bushel at the farmers' markets, making applesauce from fresh fruit, shelling peas and stripping corn off the cobs to be packed in the freezer along with the cut-up chickens, rabbits and goats that we raised and Dad slaughtered under the big sugar maple tree out the kitchen door, root crops stored in cool dry places in the cellar.  And she grew beds of flowers all around the house.

Mary in flower garden in front of the house on Sly Hill  

With all of that and raising six kids, she still found time to paint, to be active in the Rome arts scene and the community theatre, where she designed and built sets, and even tried her hand at acting once.

Pop had died not many years after the war, and Rose had come to live with Mike and Mary in the house on Sly Hill.  Rose would continue to live with Mary long after the marriage with Mike was finished, after all us kids had grown and left.  She still had four at home when she and Mike split and sold the home they'd built together.  Mary moved into town and kept the wolves from the door teaching art and painting portraits on commission.  When the last of the girls was out of high school, she retreated with Rose from the northern winters and relocated in Virginia Beach.  My younger brother Dave followed her there and so did some other young people from Rome, friends of her children for whom she'd been a surrogate mother, students that she'd introduced to art, a mobile community of hippies, musicians, artists.

When Rose passed, Mary took advantage of her new freedom from responsibility and moved to Richmond to go to college, graduating with a degree in art when she was in her sixties.  Then she moved south again, to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where one of her oldest friends had retired.  At first, she found a situation there as a live-in companion and caretaker for an elderly woman, but later her son Mike was able to buy a house for her, one with room for another big garden.

Reunion at Brantingham Lake, NY, 1995;  front left to right, Mary, Anita;  back left to right, Dave, Mona, Roy, Carla, Mike

In her eighties, Mary began to slowly fail.  Dave was still living nearby, but it was clear to all her children that she would soon need more attention and assistance than he could provide.  My youngest sister Anita was raising a son on her own in San Francisco, and she agreed to take Mom in.

There was one more move in Mary's life.  Anita lost her business, a small cafe in Sausalito, in the recession that followed the 9/11 attacks, and she, Mom and young Sam moved across the country to a small town on the east shore of Tampa Bay, close to another sister, Carla.  Her oldest daughter, Mona, flew out from New York to do the road trip with Mom, driving cross-country from California to Florida.

In the last years of her life, Mary's lungs become gradually occluded, maybe an aftereffect of those years spent welding in confined spaces, and she needed oxygen.  In the fall of '06, she took pneumonia and her doctors told Anita to take her home and make her comfortable, the end was near.  As it turned out the end wasn't that near, and each of her far-flung family had multiple opportunities for their "last" visit with Mom over the next year and a half.  In the last weeks, she moved into an assisted care facility, where she received visits from Anita and Carla almost every day.  At the very end, all three of her daughters were with her, along with her grandson Sam and a beloved niece, Ronny.

Jimenez family on Lake Delta, NY, oil painting by Mary Walton Jimenez from photo ca. 1958

left to right, Mike Jr., Dave, Carla, Mary, Anita, Roy, Mona, cousin Ronny Gleaton, Mike

Have a great Mothers' Day, all you mothers, daughters and sons out there in OS-land.