Loving DC for the Second Generation

My mother, Gloria Mary Smith Rigney, died twenty-one years ago today at the age of sixty-three. She was alone at her house in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, when she had a heart attack, her second. My sisters, brother, and my husband and I all were living in the Chicago area, and headed home the following day. I can’t say enough about what the support we received then from our extended family and old friends meant to all of us.

At some level, I think Mom was ready to go, despite her relative youth. She had been very worried about my brother, who was living in Denver and struggling. My husband and I had spent part of New Year’s Day with Mom, the last time I saw her alive, then driven to Omaha to pick up my brother and take him back to Chicago with us. He moved in with one of my sisters and got a job within days of his arrival. Mom could let go; we were all settled and looking out for each other.

I have to think that she’d be tickled pink to know that Maureen and I are living in the Washington, D.C., area these days. Mom moved here in 1944, toward the end of World War II, and worked as a Coast Guard clerk. She lived on New Hampshire Avenue in North East with some other girls, and her diary makes it sound like they had the time of their lives, helping out at the USO, dating up a storm, going to the movies and to the beach. Mom even got engaged to a snazzy pilot, a handsome guy she later dumped for reasons that have never been clear.

Shortly after we moved here, Maureen went to check out her old digs. The house is still there, and looks not much different than it does in the pictures from the era Mom lived there. It’s easy to imagine a gaggle of girls in their late teens and early twenties rushing in and out and looking out the windows for arriving dates.

After the war ended, Mom joined her parents, who had moved from Wisconsin to South Dakota, and met Dad and got married. She always regarded those years in DC as one of the highlights of her life. And now, having spent seven years (as of next week) here, I can understand why.