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AI: Oh, and you were... you were talking about your family members and which of them decided to come back to the Seattle area. What about your own parents? Did they eventually return to Seattle?

MH: My parents (...) both of them came here (to Madison), still during the war. We (...) bought a home on the edge of town, which they thoroughly enjoyed. And that was really at the edge of town, wasn't it? The bus line went up and that was it. There was no more Madison beyond. But it's not true now. And they enjoyed it until my father passed away. And after my father passed away, Mother want, didn't want to live alone, so she came to live with us and that was when we had to move out to Whitcomb Drive so she can have a, a room of her own. And we had a nice set-up. There was one bedroom on the main floor with a half bath that she can have and overlook the backyard. And we had three nice bedrooms for us upstairs. (...) We had quite a bit of land with a picket fence, I mean, a white fence all around. And there was only three trees, three flowering crab. And (...) everything was bare, so my mother, who is the artist in arranging flowers, she and I picked out flowering bushes and things that she could... so she picked out, and we planted the bushes all the way around, and then I put in a perennial flower bed all the way. So Grandma always had something to work with. But she never went out and just cut flowers like we do. She always cut flowers so that whatever remained would be just as lovely and not leave a hole. Things of that kind. And then she would do her flower arrangement early in the morning when the house was quiet, and she would sit on her knees and work on these little branches and that was her meditation period, I'm sure. And it was kind of -- and our, our family, our kids and my brothers and sisters, were accustomed to seeing these lovely arrangements. So when they see a bunch of flowers put in, it bothers them. [Laughs] It's interesting the things that they are exposed to, isn't it? So that's the story there.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.