Betty Lorraine D'Arcy Caudell: the first 90 years

Mom,

I hope you enjoy this book.*

I have learned so much while putting it together.

I am pretty impressed with what a good job you did documenting your amazing life with photographs.  

AND I’m impressed that you followed through to document so many of those photos with names and dates - even though you must have been crazy busy as an instant mom to those two energetic boys. 

I remember how when I was little I loved to lug out that huge photo album with the dark red cover and the black pages - very carefully because some of the pages were already coming loose.  As I have been sorting back through that huge book and many other albums, I have thoroughly enjoyed remembering the stories that went along with them - and trying to remember the names of some that were missing despite Dave’s best efforts to get us all to “name and date” our photos immediately.  

So many beautiful photos of wonderful people!

What wonderful reminders of who I am and where I came from.

This book contains only a sampling of the hundreds (probably thousands!) of photos you have collected through the years.  There was room for only a fraction of even the best ones.  So many tough decisions.  I hope that I’ve chosen many of your favorites to include here.  And I hope that looking through it over and over again will bring you some of the same joy that big red book brought me years and years ago.

I wish that I had succeeded in recording more of your stories, but I have had to accept the fact that they call for a separate project.  But let’s keep working on it.  You keep rehearsing those stories so that you can remember them until I get myself and my notes organized enough to capture them.  Then again, I might need some help with that project.  (Here’s looking at you, Karina!)

In this process, it has been fun for me to learn stories I don’t remember hearing before.  And maybe even some that you hadn’t heard before either.  Like the fact that the young women in your class at Bethel College were quite shocked to discover that you weren’t coming back in the fall.  That you were marrying a man with two little boys.  They couldn’t quite believe that you had the courage to do such a thing.

But everyone I talk to about it is really glad that you did.  Grateful that you made that decision and that you followed through on it all these years.  And there is a general consensus that you did a bang-up job raising those little boys and shaping us all into one big happy family.  We are forever grateful for that. 

Thank you for loving us - and a whole lot of other people in the process. 

Thank you for the example of serving people in need.

Thank you for demonstrating how to make the best of difficult situations.

I love you and am so grateful to be your daughter.

Happy Birthday!

...

* "This book" refers to the photo journal I made for my mom's 90th birthday.  
This letter was written to include in the book, but there wasn't room for it.

Fifty pages, 271 photos, millions of memories...