Annette Ainsworth filled many various roles for the Ainsworth foursome during our childhood. She cooked for us, made sure we had our lunch money, and prepared afternoon snacks for us. She put up the vegetables that we kids shelled, washed all the dishes, and made sure we cleaned our rooms each Saturday (whether the baseball game was coming on TV or not). She took us to the Bookmobile every Wednesday afternoon, gave us money to buy books from the Scholastic Book Club at school, and spread out a quilt in the yard each afternoon during the summer for our reading time. She even plotted out lines in the gravel when that was necessary. However, there was one thing we hardly ever saw Mom do; we rarely saw her laugh.

A number of factors could have been the cause of this. She was an only child, and perhaps t...

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