The Dunn Girls

I spent Friday morning in the Katrina cottage, and realized that Melanie was right, and I needed side tables to flank the love seat. Amazon to the rescue, and I bought these cute tables.

I assembled them yesterday morning, and took them out to the cottage. And finally had a place to display some treasured possessions, the high school graduation pictures of my mother and her three sisters.

I'm not the best photographer, and they are pictures of pictures, but I hope you can see how beautiful my mom and her sisters are. And not just on the outside. Really beautiful people.

Mom's sister Mary was a nurse, a nurse midwife, a nursing instructor, a neonatal clinical specialist, and a coordinator of continuing education for nurses. She worked as a medical missionary nurse in the inner city, and on an indigenous people's reservation. She was a lifelong advocate for maternal- fetal health.

Mom's sister Dorothy was an accountant for The Chicopee Manufacturing Company, a division of Johnson & Johnson. Dorothy went to work at Chicopee right out of high school. but went back to Rutgers University at night and obtained her accounting degree. But Dorothy's story is so much more than her job. She was an incredible athlete, and competed in softball, basketball and bowling when very few women did. (Think a League of our Own). But more than that was her volunteer career. She stayed active volunteering to help primarily mothers and children into her nineties. I have so many wonderful childhood memories of volunteering with Aunt Dot, and of benefiting from her volunteerism, as she was my Junior Catholic Daughters troop leader, and organized and facilitated our bowling league.

Mom's sister Fran was also a nurse, but after obtaining her nursing certification, she professed Holy Orders and became a Marist Missionary nun. She joined the missions when it was a possibility that she would never see her nuclear family again. She was sent to Papua New Guinea, where she was instrumental in establishing a mission hospital. When emphysema made it impossible to live in Papua New Guinea, she went to Australia where she worked in one of the first AIDS hospice programs, caring for terminal patients. Aunt Fran was diagnosed with cancer and returned to the Marist Mother House in Massachusetts, where she died in 2004. The last years of her life were dedicated to prayer and to writing her mission experiences down for posterity.

Mom was an executive secretary at Johnson & Johnson when she left the workforce to be a mom. After all four of us kids were in school full time, she went back to work, first part time and then full time. Mom's primary jobs were wife and mother, her work outside the home was just to help make ends meet. My mom, with my dad, created the best home any kid could ever ask for. We had the house that all the friends loved to come to. We had a pool in the backyard, and mom and dad threw amazing parties! New Year's Eve, St. Patrick's day, and two big birthday parties; one in the winter for my brother, sister and dad, and one in the late spring for me, my sister and mom.

Amazing, strong, accomplished women, those Dunn girls. It did me good to put their pictures back on display in my home. They remind me of who and where I come from. I am in a difficult place right now. On a journey that is hard, and wears me down.

But I have the Dunn women to look at and look up too. And I know the legacy of strength and service they provided is a road map for me through these hard times.