Gloria was my Brownie Troop Leader, my best friends Mom, my mother-in-law, the grandmother to my two daughters and an example in my life. I will always remember my Brownie troop leader teaching us to sing songs for our parents during a spaghetti feed at the Vallemar school. We sang, Oh My Papa and Getting to Know You. She did it with such flair too. Ketty and I spent our growing up years together. We are the same age, lived in the same community and shared memories from kindergarten through our adult life, Brownies was just one of them. It?s funny how when we were growing up we never called adults by their first name. She was always Mrs. Burdick. It was hard, even into adulthood, to call her anything else because it felt disrespectful. Gloria?s love of family was what brought joy into her life, it was important that everyone in the family knew, when family got together it was expected that you?d be there. Her desire was to make the time meaningful by organizing activities. Things like annual pumpkin patch outings. We?d load up our favorite pumpkins in the field. She would send someone to go get the guy we were to pay and bargain over the price for the load. We?d then caravan back to the house to have dinner and celebrate family birthdays in the month October. Sometimes we?d sneak in a September or November birthday too. Cake and ice cream were always part of the menu as was a slightly off key, Happy Birthday tune. Christmas was a favorite holiday that brought the family together beginning with Christmas Eve. What about those Christmas Carols we?d sing? We didn?t care how we sounded, we were having fun. We were always amazed by the pile of gifts, all wrapped and under the tree extending out into the living room, making it hard to walk around. She loved giving gifts and watched you open them with anticipation, that it was exactly what you hoped for or that you loved it as much as she did. She always had her manger scene displayed and as time passed she added her beautiful Wise Men. Nutcrackers were displayed becoming too numerous to count. Her Christmas tree was always a thing of splendor. I would spend hours looking over each ornament to see if I?d be able to find the new one(s). We were gifted with ornaments every year for our tree. One is my most precious ornament and has the best place on my tree. I loved her scrooge that hung on her tree. To my surprise she wrapped it and gave it to me as one of my Christmas gifts. Christmas morning, bright and early we would re-gather open gifts and enjoy a delicious breakfast. Steve and I added to breakfast what became the traditional tamales. We spent many hours watching and writing out Emily and Mary?s recipe so that we could carry out their tradition of making Christmas tamales and share them with the rest of the family. So you see, Gloria love her family, she loved her home and Vallemar more than anything else. She vowed she would never move and she didn?t until she got sick. But she didn?t move too far and Vicky brought many of her treasures to her place so that it felt like home. I will always cherish her, the memories she created and her love of family. In love and memory, Georgetta
